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    Republican senator says he would’ve been afraid had Capitol rioters been BLM activists

    Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin faced charges of racism and calls for his resignation after he told a radio host that he did not feel threatened by the pro-Donald Trump mob that raided the Capitol in January, but he would have been concerned if the invaders were “antifa” or Black Lives Matter activists.“I never really felt threatened,” Johnson told Wisconsin radio host Jay Weber. He said the insurrectionists were mostly “people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break a law”.“Had the tables been turned and President Donald Trump won the election and those were thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters I would have been concerned,” Johnson continued.Five people died in the 6 January riot at the Capitol, including one police officer, and dozens were injured. Prosecutors have charged more than 300 people with crimes and nearly that many had been arrested. Forty people have been arrested for assault on law enforcement officers.“This didn’t seem like an armed insurrection to me,” Johnson tole the radio host. “I mean ‘armed,’ when you hear ‘armed,’ don’t you think of firearms?The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel called on Johnson to resign in an editorial. “If he runs again, Johnson must be opposed in both the primary and general elections by people who care enough about democracy to support and defend it,” the paper said.“No, Senator Ron Johnson,” tweeted Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, “the truth is that the January 6 insurrectionists did break the law, they hurt and killed law enforcement officers, and they were trying to overturn the elected government of the United States.“To say that the opposite is true about this group of insurrectionists, but that you would have been worried if they had been Black Lives Matters protesters, is racist, dangerous and unbecoming a United States senator.”Former Democratic senator Barbara Boxer agreed.“Everybody in the country and the world saw the insurrectionists beat up, injure and kill law-enforcement at the Capitol and they saw them break the law over and over as they smashed windows and soiled the citadel of democracy,” she tweeted. “Everybody except Sen. Ron Johnson. He needs to go.”A two-term senator, Johnson would be up for re-election in 2022. He was one of Donald Trump’s most vocal defenders through the former president’s two impeachment trials and supported Trump’s efforts to overthrow the 2020 election.Days before the Capitol invasion, Johnson spread lies about voter fraud on national TV and called for a “full investigatory and fact-finding authority” to audit the election. The Trump justice department found no evidence of election fraud and dozens of courts rejected allegations of fraud by Trump lawyers as groundless. More

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    Ron Johnson Says He Still Has Many Unanswered Questions

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutTracking the ArrestsVisual TimelineInside the SiegeThe Lost HoursThe Oath KeepersAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRon Johnson Says He Still Has Many Unanswered QuestionsThe Republican senator from Wisconsin is known for regularly promoting fringe theories favored by the right, most recently questioning the fact that pro-Trump rioters attacked the Capitol.Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, has not decided if he will seek re-election in 2022.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesMarch 1, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ETSenator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has been on the forefront of elevating fringe theories about President Biden’s son Hunter, the coronavirus and the results of the 2020 election.In recent weeks he has come under renewed scrutiny for claiming in a series of radio interviews in his home state that the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was not an “armed insurrection” and for using his time during a Senate hearing to read a first-person account that posited “provocateurs” and “fake Trump supporters” were behind the attack.Mr. Johnson has a reputation for being among the most accessible, high-profile Republicans in Washington, regularly defending his views to the mainstream news media — something many of his G.O.P. colleagues do not do.He spoke with The New York Times on Thursday about his theories of who was responsible for the attack on the Capitol and what he would like to see included in the congressional investigation of it. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed.You were on the radio recently talking about how it wasn’t an armed insurrection. I was curious what the origin of that perspective was for you.When I think armed, I think firearms. And yeah, we don’t know. I have no idea. That’s one of the questions I’ve got is, how many firearms were seen, were confiscated? How many shots were fired? I believe the only ones that were fired were from law enforcement. And I’ve said I’ll defend law enforcement for taking action. I don’t understand what the uproar is. But apparently, there’s uproar somewhere. Somebody takes offense to it.And I would say, if it’s properly termed an “armed insurrection,” it was a pretty ragtag one. And again, I don’t dispute the destruction, or destructive capability of things like flagpoles and bats and that type of thing, but again, words have meaning.Well, what’s your feeling about who made up the group that stormed the Capitol?I don’t know, and I’m asking the question. I’m making no assumptions.There are just so many unanswered questions, which seems to be kind of the basic situation in so many things I’m trying to get to the bottom of. But here we are almost two months later, and there are just basic pieces of information that are missing here.In the Senate hearing the other day, you read the piece from The Federalist that suggested there were sort of provocateurs and “fake Trump supporters” that had designs on generating trouble from the crowd. And I wondered, do you share that analysis?I think it’s important, if we’re going to really get the whole truth, to understand exactly what happened, we need to look at different vantage points, different perspectives.I read that article, I think, as soon as it was published, which was shortly after Jan. 6. And I was intrigued by it. Because here was an individual that, again, I didn’t know him at the time. I actually spoke to him yesterday for the first time. But I didn’t know who he was. It just looks like he had a pretty good background. This is an instructor, focusing on this type of psychological type of warfare and that type of thing. So he seemed to be a knowledgeable observer.And I was just fascinated by the fact that he wrote down his thoughts, about 14, 15 pages, without looking at any news. So it’s kind of an unblemished accounting. And that’s really kind of the eyewitness accounts you want to examine. I’m not saying you accept everything. You don’t necessarily accept his conclusions. I think you kind of have to take at face value what he said he saw.Do you believe that, as the Federalist author Michael Waller wrote, that there were fake Trump protesters in the crowd?That’s what he said he thought he saw. I think later in the article, he didn’t see any who he would have thought were fake Trump protesters, he didn’t see them engage in any violence. I think he writes that in his article. Yeah. I’m letting his testimony stand on its own. I wasn’t there.Again, I’m drawing no conclusions whatsoever. Again, a lot of press reports are assuming, imputing all kinds of conclusions. They’re saying I’m saying things that I’m not saying at all. All I’m saying at this point in time is we need to ask a lot of questions.I wonder why you think there is merit to giving an audience to Mr. Waller’s assertions that there were either provocateurs or fake Trump supporters in the crowd, given the lack of evidence.I’m not questioning his veracity. I believe he’s probably telling the truth. That’s what he saw. I’m not agreeing with any conclusions. I’m not sure he’s really making too many conclusions, other than he concluded he saw four individual types of groups that stood out from the crowd.It might be a flawed part of the evidence, but why exclude it? Just because it doesn’t necessarily tie into whatever narrative somebody else wants to tell about the day? I’m not interested in the narratives, I’m interested in the truth.There’s been a lot of talk among some of your Republican colleagues in Congress about antifa or Black Lives Matter being involved in instigating what happened. Do you share that belief?It doesn’t really seem like that was the issue. It appears, again, this is all early, I haven’t drawn any conclusions, but it appears if there was any preplanning by groups, it was white supremacist groups, like the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers, that type of thing. 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Here’s a look at what happened and the ongoing fallout:As this video shows, poor planning and a restive crowd encouraged by President Trump set the stage for the riot.A two hour period was crucial to turning the rally into the riot.Several Trump administration officials, including cabinet members Betsy DeVos and Elaine Chao, announced that they were stepping down as a result of the riot.Federal prosecutors have charged more than 70 people, including some who appeared in viral photos and videos of the riot. Officials expect to eventually charge hundreds of others.The House voted to impeach the president on charges of “inciting an insurrection” that led to the rampage by his supporters.I’ve seen videos of other people claiming to be antifa in their hotel rooms. I don’t know if any of that’s been verified. But no, again, I am drawing no conclusions at all. But right now, it appears that there were provocateurs or agitators. It would appear it would probably be from the white supremacist groups that have already been named. But I haven’t talked to the F.B.I.You were on with Maria Bartiromo and talked about being against violent extremists from the left or the right. And it sounds like you’ve sort of landed on the position that these were right-wing groups that were involved in organizing what happened on Jan. 6. Is that right?It seems like those white supremacist groups seem to be responsible for this. I really condemn it. I mean, I’m not happy with it.I’ve attended a lot of Trump rallies. You talk to a lot of people. You see the mood in those crowds. And it is festive. It is joyful. You’re loving America. And it’s definitely pro-law enforcement and anti-breaking the law. Which is, again, why I certainly do not suspect, even a large pro-Trump crowd, I did not expect any violence from them.You said you want what you say to be accurate. And you read Mr. Waller’s piece, but without necessarily doing any due diligence to see whether what he was saying checked out.What do you mean, checked out? It’s his eyewitness account. What else is there to check out about it? I read what his credentials were, where he was teaching, at Fort Bragg. I mean, you can see in the article what his credentials are. He seemed to be pretty solid.A couple days later The Washington Post wrote an article that was very close to kind of describing things as Mr. Waller did, too. So that added further credence, from my standpoint, that what he saw, other people kind of saw and noticed and drew similar types of conclusions. Again, it’s just one piece of information that needs to be looked at, needs to be considered, needs to be tested, needs to be verified, compared against other things.Again, I’m not afraid of information. I’m amazed at how many people are. And how quick people are to put the conspiracy theory label on something, or call it disinformation.You’ve said tens of millions of Americans didn’t trust the election results. I wonder, how much do you think that’s because Republican leaders, from President Trump on down, told them not to trust the election results?I think that there’s a range of reasons why. But I’d say the main reason is that they saw their TV screens, observers not being able to observe. They see in states where all these other counties can turn in millions of votes, but in a few large counties in swing states, they just can’t get the vote totals in by 10 o’clock at night, for some reason. It just raises a level of suspicion.Well, in Wisconsin that’s because —It’s unfortunate the mainstream media’s revealed themselves to be so unbelievably biased that people on the other side of the aisle, the other side of the political spectrum, simply don’t trust them anymore. That’s part of the issue, too.One last thing. Where are you on running for re-election next year?Haven’t decided. Don’t need to decide for a while.Do you have a timeline for that?Yeah. But I’m not necessarily going to reveal it to you.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Rightwing group nearly forced Wisconsin to purge thousands of eligible voters

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    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

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    Biden tackles white supremacy in town hall: Politics Weekly Extra

    As Joe Biden visited Milwaukee, Wisconsin this week, our guest presenter Kenya Evelyn spoke to the state representative David Bowen about the administration’s early obligations to the Black voters who swung the election in the Democrats’ favour, racial equity in pandemic and vaccine plans, and how the president should combat white supremacy

    How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

    Joe Biden took the stage in Milwaukee, Wisconsin this week for his first town hall since entering the White House. For some, it was a necessary first step toward combatting racial inequities in the economy and healthcare made worse by the coronavirus. People in the audience asked the president how he was going to make sure everyone got a vaccine, and how he planned to combat white supremacy in the country. Watching intently was David Bowen, a state lawmaker and one of the young progressive Democrats leading the party forward. He told Kenya about his thoughts on the new Biden administration. Send us your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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    A Conservative Justice in Wisconsin Says He Followed the Law, Not the Politics

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    States targeted in Texas election fraud lawsuit condemn 'cacophony of bogus claims'

    Attorneys general from both parties reject baseless allegations in case filed with US supreme courtGeorgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin on Thursday urged the US supreme court to reject a lawsuit filed by Texas and backed by Donald Trump seeking to undo Joe Biden’s victory, saying the case has no factual or legal grounds and makes “bogus” claims.“What Texas is doing in this proceeding is to ask this court to reconsider a mass of baseless claims about problems with the election that have already been considered, and rejected, by this court and other courts,” Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s Democratic attorney general, wrote in a filing to the nine justices. Continue reading… More

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    Trump's latest batch of election lawsuits fizzle as dozens of losses pile up

    For a man obsessed with winning, Donald Trump is losing a lot.In the month since the election, the president and his legal team have come no closer in their frantic efforts to overturn the result, notching up dozens of losses in courts across the country, with more rolling in by the day.According to an Associated Press tally of roughly 50 cases brought by Trump’s campaign and his allies, more than 30 have been rejected or dropped, and about a dozen are awaiting action.The advocacy group Democracy Docket put Trump’s losses even higher, tweeting on Friday that Trump’s team had lost 46 post-election lawsuits following several fresh losses in several states on Friday.Trump has notched just one small victory, a case challenging a decision to move the deadline to provide missing proof of identification for certain absentee ballots and mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania.Five more losses came on Friday. The Trump campaign lost its bid to overturn the results of the election in Nevada and a Michigan appeals court rejected a case from his campaign. The Minnesota supreme court dismissed a challenge brought by GOP lawmakers. And in Arizona, a judge threw out a bid to undo Biden’s victory there, concluding that the state’s Republican party chairwoman failed to prove fraud or misconduct and that the evidence presented at trial wouldn’t reverse Trump’s loss. The Wisconsin supreme court also declined to hear a lawsuit brought by a conservative group over Trump’s loss.Trump’s latest failings came as California certified Joe Biden as the official winner in the state, officially handing him the electoral college majority needed to win the White House. Secretary of State Alex Padilla’s formal approval of the state’s 55 pledged electors brought Biden’s tally so far to 279, according to a count by the Associated Press – just over the 270 threshold needed for victory.The Republican president and his allies continue to mount new cases, recycling the same baseless claims, even after Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, declared this week that the justice department had uncovered no widespread fraud.“This will continue to be a losing strategy, and in a way it’s even bad for him: he gets to re-lose the election numerous times,“ said Kent Greenfield, a professor at Boston College Law School. “The depths of his petulance and narcissism continue to surprise me.”Trump has refused to admit he lost and this week posted a 46-minute speech to Facebook filled with conspiracy theories, misstatements and vows to keep up his fight to subvert the election.Judges in battleground states have repeatedly swatted down legal challenges brought by the president and his allies. Trump’s legal team has vowed to take one Pennsylvania case to the US supreme court even though it was rejected in a scathing ruling by a federal judge, as well as an appeals court.After recently being kicked off Trump’s legal team, the conservative attorney Sidney Powell filed new lawsuits in Arizona and Wisconsin this week riddled with errors and wild conspiracy claims about election rigging. One of the plaintiffs named in the Wisconsin case said he never agreed to participate in the case and found out through social media that he had been included.In his video posted Wednesday, Trump falsely claimed there were facts and evidence of a mass conspiracy created by Democrats to steal the election, a similar argument made by his lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others before judges, which have been largely unsuccessful.Most of their claims are rooted in conspiracy theories about voting machines, as well as testimony from partisan poll watchers who claimed they didn’t get close enough to see ballots being tallied because of Covid safety precautions.“No, I didn’t hear any facts or evidence,“ tweeted the Pennsylvania attorney general, Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, after watching the video Wednesday night. “What I did hear was a sad Facebook rant from a man who lost an election.” More