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      Barack Obama criticizes Republicans for pushing election lie

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      Americans should be worried that the Republican party “is willing to embrace a way of thinking about our democracy that would be unrecognisable and unacceptable even five years ago”, Barack Obama said on Monday.The former president warned Americans “to recognise that the path towards an undemocratic America is not gonna happen in just one bang” but will instead come “in a series of steps”, as seen under authoritarian leaders in Hungary and Poland.Obama was speaking to CNN the night before two Senate committees released a report on the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January.Five people died after supporters of Donald Trump stormed the building in service of Trump’s lie that his conclusive defeat by Joe Biden in the electoral college and the popular vote was caused by electoral fraud.Trump was impeached a second time, with support from 10 House Republicans. But Republicans in the Senate acquitted him of inciting an insurrection. He remains free to run for office and has returned to public speaking and hinted about plans for running for the White House again in 2024.Last month, Republicans blocked the formation of a 9/11-style commission to investigate the Capitol attack. The Senate report released on Tuesday did not address political questions.Away from Washington, in states including Texas, Florida and Georgia, Republicans are pursuing laws to restrict ballot access in constituencies likely to vote Democratic, and to make it easier to overturn election results.In Washington, opposition from centrist Democrats such as the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin is blocking federal voting rights protections.Obama told CNN “large portions of an elected Congress [are] going along with the falsehood that there were problems with the election”.Some Republicans did speak up against Trump’s lie after 6 January, Obama said, praising officials like Brad Raffensperger, the Republican Georgia secretary of state who resisted pressure to overturn Biden’s win there, as “very brave”.But then, Obama said, “poof, suddenly everybody was back in line. Now, the reason for that is because the base believed it and the base believed it because this had been told to them not just by the president, but by the media that they watch.“My hope is that the tides will turn. But that does require each of us to understand that this experiment in democracy is not self-executing. It doesn’t happen just automatically.”Obama, the first black president, has considered his impact on the American right at length, particularly in his memoir, A Promised Land, which was published after the 2020 election.He told CNN the rightwing media, most prominently Fox News, was a particular driver of deepening division. Republicans and Democrats, he said, “occupy different worlds. And it becomes that much more difficult for us to hear each other, see each other.“We have more economic stratification and segregation. You combine that with racial stratification and the siloing of the media, so you don’t have just Walter Cronkite delivering the news, but you have 1,000 different venues. All that has contributed to that sense that we don’t have anything in common.”Asking “how do we start once again being able to tell a common story about where this country goes?”, Obama said Americans on either side of the divide needed to meet and talk more often.“The question now becomes how do we create … meeting places,” he said. “Because right now, we don’t have them and we’re seeing the consequences of that.” More

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      Trump feared Democrats would replace Biden with Michelle Obama, book claims

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      Donald Trump called Joe Biden a “mental retard” during the 2020 election, a new book says, but was reluctant to attack him too strongly for fear the Democrats would replace him with Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama.Biden went on to beat Trump by more than 7m in the popular vote and by 306-232 in the electoral college, a result Trump deemed a landslide when it was in his favour against Clinton in 2016.Trump refused to accept defeat, pushing the lie that it was the result of electoral fraud. The lie resulted in the deadly Capitol attack of 6 January, by a mob Trump told to “fight like hell”, and a second impeachment. Trump was acquitted of inciting the insurrection and remains eligible to run for office.He tops polls of Republican nominees for 2024 and has returned to public speaking. On Monday, Forbes reported a planned tour with the former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, who left the network amid claims of sexual misconduct.Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, by Michael Bender of the Wall Street Journal, will be published in August. Trump was among interviewees for the book. Vanity Fair published an excerpt on Monday.Previous revelations include that the Fox News host Sean Hannity, who was rebuked for campaigning with Trump, wrote an ad for the Trump campaign – a report Hannity denied.Bender writes that Trump interrupted a White House meeting to ask: “How am I losing in the polls to a mental retard?”The idea Democrats would replace Biden reportedly came from Dick Morris, a former adviser to Bill Clinton who has migrated rightwards and who was informally advising Trump.“Dick Morris told Trump that Biden was too old and too prone to gaffes to be the nominee,” Bender writes.Biden was 78 when he became the oldest president ever sworn in. Trump turns 75 next week.Bender adds that Trump believed his attacks on the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren early in the Democratic primary were too successful. Trump gave Warren a racist nickname, Pocahontas, based on her claim to Native American ancestry.Thinking Warren would have been an easier opponent, Bender writes, Trump fretted to aides that Democrats would “realise [Biden is] old, and they’re going to give it to somebody else. They’re going to give it to Hillary, or they’re going to give it to Michelle Obama.”Trump reportedly feared Democrats would move to replace Biden at their convention.According to widespread reporting, Trump’s fears about Clinton were not entirely without justification. Clinton did consider jumping into a race in which Biden struggled before surging to victory.According to Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere, released last month, the former first lady, senator and secretary of state “would muse aloud sometimes” about taking the nomination at a contested convention.Michelle Obama, however, never expressed interest. The former first lady remains hugely popular with the Democratic base but has repeatedly ruled out a career in frontline politics. More

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      Arizona emails show Trump pushed ‘to prove any fraud’ before Capitol attack

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      As Donald Trump digested news of a diminished online presence this week—a two-year suspension from Facebook for inciting the Capitol attack, and confirmation that his blog shuttered due to a “staggeringly small audience”—North Carolina’s Republican convention on Saturday night was poised to potentially strengthen an anaemic political operation.In the wake of his loss to Joe Biden, Trump’s political operation shrunk “to a ragtag team of former advisers who are still on his payroll, reminiscent of the bare-bones cast of characters that helped lift a political neophyte to his unlikely victory in 2016,” The New York Times reported. Most of these figures, The Times pointed out, “go days or weeks without interacting with Mr. Trump in person.”Meanwhile, Trump’s brash businessman persona seemed to have waned. While he travels to Manhattan from his New Jersey golf club to work out of Trump Tower “at least once a week,” his commute draws scant attention. In his Trump Tower office, he is “mostly alone, with two assistants and a few body men.” He no longer has the company of longtime cronies and staffers, nor his children, per this Times report. It’s unclear what Trump will say at this conference, which The Times described as being “billed as the resumption of rallies and speeches.” But Trump’s presence could show just how much sway he holds over the Republican party. It could also test the extent to which his day-to-day supporters remain loyal to him. Facebook announced on Friday that the company would suspend Trump for two years. This announcement follows the recommendation of Facebook’s oversight board. Trump was suspended from the social media site in January, for inciting supporters to attack the US Capitol building, in service of his lie that Joe Biden won because of electoral fraud. “Given the gravity of the circumstances that led to Mr Trump’s suspension, we believe his actions constituted a severe violation of our rules which merit the highest penalty available under the new enforcement protocols. We are suspending his accounts for two years, effective from the date of the initial suspension on January 7 this year,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice-president of global affairs, remarked in a statement on Friday.Suspension from Facebook would likely pose a devastating sucker-punch to most politicians’ aspirations—it’s a platform where beneficial disinformation can proliferate, not to mention an opportunity for direct access to voters. But Trump’s response to this ban might have teased his political future—namely, dropping a strong hint that he’d run for president again in 2024. “Next time I’m in the White House there will be no more dinners, at his request, with Mark Zuckerberg and his wife. It will be all business!” remarked Trump’s statement responding to this suspension. These comments came amid reports this week that Trump believes he will be reinstated to the White House by August. Trump did not say in his Facebook statement Friday whether he thought he’d resume his role due to reinstatement, or due to a successful presidential run in 2024. Regardless of these will he-or-won’t he vagaries, recent metrics showed that Trump’s hold on the Republican Party was strong. “Even in defeat, Mr. Trump remains the front-runner for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2024 in every public poll so far,” The Times noted.The extent to which Trump might attempt a comeback was further underscored by revelations about how much he tried to influence results in Arizona’s election. Emails were released this week in which the Republican president of the Arizona state senate said Trump called her after his election defeat last year, to thank her “for pushing to prove any fraud”.The emails add to understanding of the evolution of Trump’s “big lie”, that his defeat by Biden was the result of mass electoral fraud, and how it fuelled the deadly Capitol assault. The Arizona emails were obtained by American Oversight, a legal watchdog, via a Freedom of Information request. They showed how Trump and his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, pushed officials to act and how a controversial election audit in Arizona’s most populous county came to be set up.Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia are prominent among states which produced Biden victories Trump and his supporters insist won by fraud. They were not.The release of the Arizona emails showed how Trump pursued his claim of fraud after the election was called.Election day was 3 November. Biden was declared the winner four days later. The Democrat won by more than 7m votes and by 306-232 in the electoral college. That was the score by which Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, a result Trump called a landslide.Regardless, Trump went on the offensive with a frantic legal effort to prove fraud, led by Giuliani and almost entirely laughed out of court.In one Arizona email released on Friday, dated 2 December, Karen Fann, the Republican state senate president, told two constituents she had spoken to Giuliani “at least six times over the past two weeks”.Threatened later in the month with being recalled from office by “the new patriot movement of the United States”, Fann wrote that the state senate was “doing everything legally possible to get the forensic audit done”.Republicans in Maricopa county, the most populous county in Arizona, mounted a controversial audit of ballots. Most analysts view the audit as part of a concerted attempt by Republicans in state governments to restrict access to the ballot or produce laws by which results can be overturned.In the emails released by American Oversight, Fann told the constituent threatening action against her she had been “in numerous conversations with Rudy Guiliani [sic] over the past weeks trying to get this done”.She added: “I have the full support of him and a personal call from President Trump thanking us for pushing to prove any fraud.”Fann also told a constituent concerned about the use of taxpayers’ money: “Biden won. 45% of all Arizona voters think there is a problem with the election system. The audit is to disprove those theories or find ways to improve the system.”The emails also show the involvement of Christina Bobb. A reporter for One America News Network, a rightwing TV channel praised by Trump, Bobb has raised funds in support of the Maricopa audit.Another fringe rightwing network, Newsmax, has said it will show Trump’s return to public speaking on Saturday evening. More

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      Push to review 2020 votes across US an effort to ‘handcuff’ democracy

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterConservative activists across America are pushing efforts to review the 2020 vote more than six months after the election, a move experts say is a dangerous attempt to continue to sow doubt about the results of the 2020 election that strikes at the heart of America’s democratic process.Encouraged by an ongoing haphazard review of 2.1m ballots in Arizona, activists are pushing to review votes or voting equipment in California, Georgia, Michigan, and New Hampshire.Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, the powerful speaker of the state house of representatives recently hired ex-law enforcement officers, including one with a history of supporting Republicans, to spend the next three months investigating claims of fraud. At least one of the officers hired has a history of supporting GOP claims. The announcement also came after state officials announced they found just 27 cases of potential fraud in 2020 out of 3.3m votes cast.The reviews are not going to change the 2020 election results or find widespread fraud, which is exceedingly rare. Nonetheless, the conservative activists behind the effort – many of whom have little election experience – have championed the reviews as an attempt to assuage concerns the 2020 election was stolen. If the probes don’t turn up anything, they will only serve to increase confidence in elections, proponents say.But experts see something much more dangerous happening. Continuing to review elections, especially after a result has been finalized, will allow conspiracy theories to fester and undercut the authority of legitimately elected officials, they say. Once election results are certified by state officials, they have long been considered final and it is unprecedented to continue to probe results months after an official is sworn in. It’s an issue that gets at the heart of America’s electoral system – if Americans no longer have faith their officials are legitimately elected, they worry, the country is heading down an extremely dangerous path.“It is either a witting or unwitting effort to handcuff democratic self-governance,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Research.The efforts also come at the same moment that Republican legislatures around the country are pushing new restrictions to restrict voting access. Unable to point to evidence of significant fraud, Republican lawmakers have frequently said that new restrictions are needed to restore confidence in elections.In New Hampshire, activists have tried to co-opt an audit in the 15,000 person town of Windham to try and resolve a legitimate discrepancy in vote totals for a state representative race. They unsuccessfully tried to pressure officials there to drop experienced auditors in favor of Jovan Pulitzer, a conspiracy theorist reportedly involved in the Arizona recount who has become a kind of celebrity among those who believe the election was stolen. Even though the experienced auditors have found no evidence of wrongdoing, activists have continued to float baseless theories of wrongdoing in a Telegram channel following audits.“Nothing today is showing evidence of fraud. Nothing today is showing evidence of digital manipulation of the machines,” Harri Hursti, an election expert and one of the auditors, said this week, according to WMUR. “It’s amazing how much disinformation and dishonest reporting has been spreading.”Activists are also pressuring officials in Cheboygan county, Michigan to let an attorney affiliated with Sidney Powell, a Trump ally who brought baseless lawsuits after the election, conduct an audit of election equipment. The chair of the board of commissioners told the Detroit News he could not recall a more contentious issue debated before the board in more than two decades.The Michigan efforts prompted a letter from the state’s top election official, who warned the clerks in Cheboygan and Antrim county – another hotbed of conspiracy theories – that boards didn’t have authority to order audits and not to turn over election equipment to unaccredited outside firms, the Washington Post reported. Michigan conducted more than 250 audits after the 2020 race that affirmed the results.Dominion voting systems, which sold equipment to the state, also warned that counties may not be able to use machines in future elections if they turned them over to uncertified auditors.“We have every reason to want transparency,” Jocelyn Benson, the state’s top election official, said in an interview. “But that’s not what this is. This is about an effort, as has been proved time and time again by the actions of these individuals, in Arizona and elsewhere, this is an effort to actually spread falsehoods and misinformation under the guise of transparency.”San Luis Obispo county in the central coast of California has been another target for calls for an audit. During a meeting earlier this month, officials played hours of recorded messages calling for an audit, including one asking whether Tommy Gong, the county’s clerk and recorder, was a member of the communist party.Activists are also targeting Fulton county, Georgia, another place that was at the center of Trump’s baseless election attacks last year. Earlier in May, a local judge said that an group led by Garland Favorito, who has reportedly pushed conspiracy theories about 9/11 and the JFK assassination, could inspect absentee ballots, though in a key break from the Arizona review, the judge made it clear that the actual ballots would have to remain in county officials’ custody. Georgia has already manually recounted all of the ballots in the state, which confirmed Joe Biden’s win over Trump last year.Even in Arizona, the crown jewel of the audit movement, activists may have plans to do even more auditing after the current review of 2.1m ballots wraps up. Republicans are finalizing a plan to use untested software to analyze images of ballots, the Arizona Republic reported Friday.“Rarely do the losers believe the they have lost, but historically those who fell short graciously concede once all legal channels are exhausted,” said Tammy Patrick, a former election official in Maricopa county who now serves as a senior adviser at the Democracy Fund.“The proliferation of these actions undermine and erode the very foundation of election integrity and our adversaries need only sit back and watch as we chip away at our democratic norms. We should be telling the American voter the truth – the election had integrity, real audits and recounts were done, court challenges heard.” More

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      Patrick Byrne: pro-Trump millionaire pushing election conspiracy theories

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      This Memorial Day weekend, several prominent conservative allies of Donald Trump, who have promoted almost nonstop his false narratives about the 2020 election results, are slated to hold rallies in Florida and Texas endorsed by the wealthy libertarian Patrick Byrne.Billed as featuring the Trump confidant Roger Stone, the retired general Michael Flynn, Byrne and other pro-Trump stalwarts, the dual events underscore that Byrne – who has been leading private fundraising for the politically driven vote audit now under way in Arizona’s largest county – seems intent on funding and pushing conspiracy theories about the 2020 elections.Byrne’s influence and activities reveal him to be a rising figure on the Trumpist right and also show how fake narratives around the 2020 election – far from receding – are in fact still a powerful motivating force among Trump supporters.Just last month Byrne created a non-profit, dubbed the America Project, which has been instrumental in funding the Arizona audit, and is promoting the two weekend rallies on its website. The Byrne non-profit quickly launched fundtheaudit.com in Arizona that has indicated it wants to raise $2.8m. As of mid May, it had reportedly pulled in $1.7m.Byrne, whose net worth has been pegged at about $75m, has said he personally donated $1m to the America Project and $500,000 to fundtheaudit.com.Byrne’s America Project seems to aspire to play a key role in tandem with other conservative pro-Trump bastions in spreading election disinformation: the America Project’s website says it wants to “lead a new American renaissance by arming citizens with the tools to fight for their freedoms, building like minded pro-freedom networks and uniting pro-America organizations who want to fight together in support of our nation”.Byrne’s high-profile backing of pro-Trump conspiracies follows some bizarre contacts he had with Trump, post-election. In December, Byrne attended a White House meeting that also drew Flynn, who had publicly suggested Trump might invoke martial law to stay in power, and the rightwing lawyer Sidney Powell, who was helping Trump’s legal team.Byrne is the founder and ex-chief of the company Overstock, and says he didn’t vote for Trump, but this year wrote The Deep Rig, a self-published conspiracy-ridden look at the 2020 elections. Byrne’s growing role on the far right comes after he publicly revealed he had an affair with Maria Butina, the convicted unregistered foreign agent for Russia, which prompted his resignation from Overstock in 2019.The upcoming Florida rally on Sunday is set to feature Byrne, along with Flynn and Stone – both of whom Trump pardoned after they had been convicted as part of the inquiries into Russian influence in the 2016 elections. Advertised as a Patriots Day rally, it is slated to take place at a private ranch in Jupiter.The three-day Texas event is billed as a rally for “God and country” that started on Friday and is scheduled to include talks by various pro-Trump stalwarts including Flynn and lawyers Powell and Lin Wood.But Byrne’s central role in funding the Arizona audit and how it is being run is attracting growing scrutiny. Byrne has acknowledged that he had some brief contacts last December with Doug Logan, the head of the little-known Florida-based cybersecurity firm Cyber Ninjas, which was selected by Arizona officials to lead the audit, even though it had no experience in doing one previously.“This is an audit like none that has ever been performed,” Byrne boasted to the AP. “This audit is an audit check for all forms of mischief.”Byrne’s non-profit outfits, which won’t have to disclose how the funds are spent or who is writing the checks, also have reportedly played a role in recruiting volunteers for the audit.In an email to local Arizona Republicans last week, a state official requested more volunteers and referred them to Byrne’s website to apply, the Arizona Republic reported. Byrne told the AP his operation merely sends volunteers to Cyber Ninjas for “vetting”.The private funding Byrne is spearheading comes on top of $150,000 that the Arizona senate allocated to do the latest audit, a project which many Republican figures in Arizona and nationally have attacked as a waste of resources and dangerous since Biden’s victory in Maricopa county has already been certified as accurate.Voting rights specialists are dismayed at the haphazard and private drive in Arizona that Byrne and his cohorts are mounting.“This is yet another piece of evidence that the whole effort in Arizona is more of a disinformation campaign than anything else,” said Larry Norden, the director of the electoral reform program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “A good rule of thumb is that you should not take election’s work out of the hands of the professionals who run them and outsource it to people with a clear political agenda. It’s profoundly dangerous for our democracy.”Some former Republican members of Congress say the privately run crusade by Byrne and his allies is hurting democracy in America as a whole.Jeff Flake, a Republican former Arizona senator, said in an interview that Byrne’s “involvement in all this does not add credibility. It’s damaging to the Republican party and our system of government.”Byrne did not respond to requests for comment left with the America Project.But judging by his media appearances, Byrne isn’t fazed by critics of the growing role he has been playing.Last month, Byrne in an interview with the New Tang Dynasty, an obscure television outlet whose website claims it was launched by Chinese-Americans who fled communism, flatly claimed: “It was a fraudulent election. It didn’t end for us on January 20.’’Likewise, Byrne’s fundraising to promote false information about the elections may not end in Arizona.The America Project website says if fundraising exceeds the $2.8m goal, it will use the monies “for other election integrity activities’’ including audits in other states and related expenses. More

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      US investigating if Ukrainian officials interfered in 2020 election – report

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      Federal prosecutors in New York are investigating whether Ukrainian officials attempted to interfere in the 2020 presidential election to undermine Joe Biden and help Donald Trump, the New York Times has reported, citing unnamed sources “with knowledge of the matter”.The criminal investigation includes examining whether the Ukrainian officials used Rudy Giuliani, then personal lawyer to the former president, to spread misleading claims about Biden, the New York Times reported.The inquiry, which began during the final months of the Trump administration, is being handled by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, the newspaper reported, and is separate from an ongoing criminal investigation into Giuliani’s dealings in Ukraine.One of the officials being investigated is a Ukrainian member of parliament named Andriy Derkach, the newspaper reported.The US Treasury Department previously sanctioned Derkach, identifying him as an “active Russian agent for over a decade”.Giuliani, who the New York Times said has not been accused of wrongdoing in this investigation, has previously denied representing any Ukrainians.The US Attorney’s Office and Arthur Aidala, a lawyer for Giuliani, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Giuliani’s business dealings with Ukrainian oligarchs while he was working as Trump’s lawyer are the subject of an investigation by federal prosecutors in Manhattan. Federal agents searched his home and office in April, seizing phones and computers.Giuliani has denied allegations in that probe and his lawyers have suggested the investigation is politically motivated. More

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      Most Republicans still believe 2020 election was stolen from Trump – poll

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      A majority of Republicans still believe Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election and blame his loss to Joe Biden on baseless claims of illegal voting, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll.The 17-19 May national poll found that 53% of Republicans believe Trump, their party’s nominee, is the “true president” now, compared with 3% of Democrats and 25% of all Americans.About one-quarter of adults believe the 3 November election was tainted by false allegations of illegal voting, including 56% of Republicans, according to the poll. The figures were roughly the same in a poll that ran from 13-17 November which found that 28% of all Americans and 59% of Republicans felt that way.Biden, a Democrat, won by more than 7m votes. Dozens of courts rejected Trump’s challenges to the results, but Trump and his supporters have persisted in pushing baseless conspiracy theories on conservative news outlets.US federal and state officials have said repeatedly they have no evidence that votes were compromised or altered during the presidential election, rejecting the unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud advanced by Trump and many of his supporters. Voter fraud is extremely rare in the US.Yet the Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that 61% of Republicans believe the election was “stolen” from Trump. Only about 29% of Republicans believe he should share some of the blame for his supporters’ 6 January deadly attack at the US Capitol, after Trump gave an inflammatory speech encouraging the crowds. The former president was impeached by the House earlier this year for “incitement of insurrection”.Still, 67% of overall respondents say they trust election officials in their town to do their job honestly, including 58% of Republicans, according to the poll.The November and May polls were both conducted online, in English, throughout the United States. The May poll gathered responses from 2,007 adults, including 909 Democrats and 754 Republicans. The poll has a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of about four percentage points. More