On Thursday, Representative Steve Cohen (D-TN), who has been a loud critic of President Donald Donald Trump, introduced two bills to do away with the Electoral College and prevent presidents from pardoning themselves or their family members.
These people are as unamerican as it gets.
Cohen introduced the constitutional amendments on the first night of the 116th Congress, both insults to Trump.
“Presidents should not pardon themselves, their families, their administration or campaign staff,” Cohen said in a statement. “This constitutional amendment would expressly prohibit this and any future president, from abusing the pardon power.”
The numbskull congressman doesn’t understand that the president has plenary powers of the pardon and any use of it is not an abuse of power. It’s like listening to children.
A third term of President Jimmy Carter is more likely than for either of the Amendments to pass because Amendments require a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress and then they go out to the states and must be ratified by three-fourths of them. Yes, I know that presidents can only have two terms. As I said, a third term of Jimmy Carter has a better chance.
Cohen is the loudmouth who once predicted that Donald Trump Jr. and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner would both be indicted by Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed by his good buddy Rod Rosenstein to investigate the fake phony fraud Russian collusion delusion nonsense. Of course, he wouldn’t provide any evidence. None of the Democrats who said the Trump family was guilty of anything ever did. Hell, Adam Schiff (D-CA) the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee for over two years said daily that he had evidence that Russian collusion happened with the Trump campaign, and he never provided a single piece of his professed evidence.
Last summer President Trump said that he has the right to pardon himself, but that he doesn’t have to do that, because he’s done nothing wrong and has committed no crimes. The only thing a president cannot pardon themself over is an impeachment. I believe the president should rethink that logic because things have changed radically since then. The Democrats made up impeachment articles against him and there’s nothing now to stop them from making up a crime against Trump to go after him once he’s out of office.
“As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong?” the president wrote in a tweet.
Many Democrats are bringing back the idiotic idea of getting rid of the Electoral College. They started complaining about it after George W Bush lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College. Only five presidents have done that: John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, George W Bush, and Donald J Trump. Hillary Clinton’s first bill she presented as a US Senator was the eliminate the Electoral College. Back then, most of the Democrats in Washington still had some common sense and the bill was never taken seriously. Hillary certainly screeched a lot about it after she won the popular vote against Donald Trump (304-227), but he won the Electoral College.
“In two presidential elections since 2000, including the most recent one in which Hillary Clinton won 2.8 million more votes than her opponent, the winner of the popular vote did not win the election because of the distorting effect of the outdated Electoral College,” Cohen blathered in his statement about the bill he introduced. “Americans expect and deserve the winner of the popular vote to win office.”
Cohen appears to suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome at Level 7, which is the highest known level of the disease.
“More than a century ago, we amended our Constitution to provide for the direct election of US Senators,” he added. “It is past time to directly elect our President and Vice President.”
This clown doesn’t understand that the 17th Amendment which changed how Senators are elected was one of the single most damaging Amendments to our country ever passed. Prior to the 17th Amendment, senators were elected by state legislatures. This meant that if a US Senator was voting in ways that were not supportive of his state, the legislature could remove him from office. The 17th Amendment changed that and senators are now elected by the popular vote of the American voters. The problem with this is that the change in how senators are elected made it so that senators are no longer loyal to their state, but now are loyal to Washington, DC. It was the creation of the Swamp.
What Cohen is doing is showboating for his constituents and his Democrat colleagues, but more importantly he is showboating his extreme ignorance of the law and our history.
Phil Kline, the director of the “Amistad Journey,” a group of people working on Voter Integrity issues, talked about Big Tech influence in swing states to throw the election to Joe Biden and said he would present evidence that there are “serious problems with elections, and citizens are demanding it not happen again,” at a press conference on Wednesday.
“Private money bought elections,” Kline said.
“We’re hosting a national press conference to release a groundbreaking report exposing a dark money apparatus of 10 nonprofit organizations funded by five foundations whose intent was to fundamentally undermine the electoral system,” Phil Kline posted on Twitter on Wednesday before the press conference.
Kyle Becker posted a link to a report that Kline said had the proof of what he claimed:
BIG TECH.💻🚨
"Funded by HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of dollars from FACEBOOK founder Mark Zuckerberg & other high-tech interests, activist orgs. created a two-tiered election system…"
This is "contrary to both federal law & state election plans" according to SCATHING new report.🔻 pic.twitter.com/jDGmeqgd3g
Kline referred to the report throughout the event and said it was ” commissioned by Amistad project for the Thomas Moore Society done by Still Water tech. Solutions.” A representative of the company attended the press conference.
“There was one half-billion-dollar to fund election which was $100,000 more than federal appropriations and so that makes what we are going to uncover a shadow government, funding the election. So who allowed private companies to have access to the information? They did it by dangling the dollar bill to incite officials to throw elections,” Kline said.
The entire damning report from The Amistad Project can be found here: https://t.co/RnelZ2Tjgk
“Today, we will reveal our report, painting a clear picture of a cabal of billionaires and activists using their wealth to subvert, control, and fundamentally alter the electoral system itself. We must act now to prevent such privatized elections in the future,” Kline posted on Twitter.
The report summary read:
“The 2020 presidential election witnessed an unprecedented and coordinated public-private partnership to improperly influence the 2020 the presidential election on behalf of one particular candidate and party. Funded by hundreds of millions of dollars from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and other high-tech interests, activist organizations created a two-tiered election system that treated voters differently depending on whether they lived in Democrat or Republican strongholds.
Private monies dictated city and county election management contrary to both federal law and state election plans endorsed and developed by state legislatures with authority granted by the United States Constitution. Moreover, executive officials in swing states facilitated, through unique and novel contracts, the sharing of private and sensitive information about citizens within those states with private interests, some whom actively promote leftist candidates and agendas.
This data sharing allowed direct access to data of unique political value to leftist causes and created new vulnerabilities for digital manipulation of state electronic poll books and counting systems and machines. This public-private partnership in these swing states effectively placed government’s thumb on the scale to help these private interests achieve their objectives and to benefit the candidates of one political party. The Amistad Project began monitoring these activities beginning in the spring of 2019, originally focusing on the digital vulnerabilities of state election systems.
Amistad became aware that states and local election officials failed to maintain the legal right to access computer logs on the machines
counting ballots. The first step to engaging any computer forensic examination is to gain access to machine logs. Yet, scores of election officials failed to maintain the right to even review such information, much less establish a method for bipartisan review. In effect, America purchased a complex ballot box (computer) into which its votes would be deposited, but didn’t have the right to open the box and review the count. As COVID escalated in March of 2020, The Amistad Project began witnessing troubling efforts to undermine the integrity of 2020 by assaulting laws designed to protect the integrity of the absentee ballot. The use of absentee ballots is uniquely vulnerable to fraud, as detailed in a special bipartisan congressional report authored by former President Jimmy Carter and James Baker.
In-person voting occurs with trained election officials present. These officials deter voter intimidation and coercion and are trained to educate, not mislead, the voter when completing the ballot. Moreover, in-person voting allows for voter identification. When the ballot leaves government controls, new challenges are present. There are few identities checks and no assurance the ballot was completed without intimidation, coercion, inducement, or by a person other than the voter.
Accordingly, states have basic, common-sense laws protecting the integrity of the absentee, advance, or mailed ballot.
Beginning in the spring of 2020, left-leaning organizations filed a massive number of lawsuits to challenge these integrity laws. Lawsuits sought to set aside witness requirements, identification requirements, deadlines, delivery requirements, ballot deadlines, signature requirements, application requirements, and even argued that the Constitution required all returned ballot envelopes be postage prepaid due to COVID.
William Barr, the US Attorney General resigned on Monday, and the American public heard from a tweet by President Donald J. Trump. In Barr’s place will be Jeffrey Rosen, who will oversee the remaining issues around the 2020 Presidential Election. It is noteworthy to re-visit Rosen’s remarks from August 2020 on the US Election.
HIGHLIGHTS:
“We are working to counter all of these influence activities. But it is important to remember that there are times when drawing attention to the threats can be precisely what the bad actors want, to generate concern and distrust, division, and discord. And as Americans, we need to avoid the temptation to seek political advantage from the revelation of influence activities that were meant to divide us,” Rosen said.
2018 Executive Order Cited
“So malign foreign influence efforts in our elections has been a perennial problem. But though the general threat isn’t novel, some of the challenges we’re facing now are different. As President Trump put it in Executive Order 13848: “In recent years, the proliferation of digital devices and internet-based communications has created significant vulnerabilities and magnified the scope and intensity…”Rosen said.
WE HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE AND PEOPLE ARE WATCHING
Instead, the right response is for our electorate to be knowledgeable and careful about the sources of information they rely on, to look for accurate information, to inform themselves about the candidates, and to cast their ballots accordingly. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves.” So let me offer some final thoughts about what the historical records tells us that Americans can do to protect ourselves from the malign influence efforts of foreign governments, in addition to the strong measures being taken by the Justice Department and other government agencies.
WATCH REMARKS:
Full and unedited remarks from the DOJ Press Release:
Remarks of Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen on Malign Foreign Influence in U.S. Elections Presented at Center for Strategic and International StudiesWashington, DC ~ Wednesday, August 26, 2020
Remarks as Prepared for Delivery
Thank you for hosting me today. What I want to talk about is malign foreign influence in U.S. elections. Now this might surprise some people, but 2020 happens to be a federal election year. So I want to start with some good news, which is that our election infrastructure — things like our polling places and printed ballots — have been well-protected and that protection has improved over the last three years. With regard to the most recent 2018 midterm elections, DHS and DOJ jointly found no evidence that foreign actors had “any material impact on the integrity or security of election infrastructure or political/campaign infrastructure used in the 2018 midterm elections for the United States Congress.” Likewise, as the Senate Committee on Intelligence has reported, there is no evidence that any vote totals were altered or changed by any foreign actors in the 2016 Presidential election.
Watch Deputy Attorney General Rosen’s remarks
But interference with infrastructure is not our only concern. We are also concerned about another threat, known as a malign foreign influence. The keyword is “influence.” Much of the time that is disguised propaganda. Other times, it is using pressure tactics on influential people. It can also take the form of hacking and disclosing private emails or phone messages. It comes in many different forms, all designed to influence how Americans think about issues and cast their votes. There are good lists of these on the FBI and ODNI websites.
We cannot escape the reality that the opportunities for malign foreign influence in our elections are far-flung, so it remains a challenge for Americans as voters. That didn’t end in 2016. But it didn’t begin in 2016, either. Malign foreign influence efforts have been a longstanding concern in American elections, and that historical context can teach us some lessons. I’d like to use these remarks first to discuss some of this historical context, then to offer a few comparisons with what we’ve seen more recently, and finally to share a little advice we can borrow from our predecessors.
I think it helps to clarify a few definitions to describe what we mean by “malign foreign influence,” as opposed to what we might consider legitimate diplomacy or candid expressions of legitimate national interests that all nations share with each other. One definition that’s easiest to remember is the 3 C’s framework: coercive, covert, or corrupt activities by foreign governments to influence U.S. policies, political sentiment, or public discourse, or to interfere in our political processes themselves. Under this framework, we recognize that foreign governments often have preferences about U.S. policies or the outcomes of our elections. Sometimes those preferences are expressed openly. Our government sometimes has open preferences about other countries, too. When those preferences are open and attributable, no one is deceived or misled.
But we are concerned when those preferences manifest themselves through malign foreign influence activities that are coercive, covert, or corrupt, whether the aim is specifically to influence our elections, or to influence policymaking and public discourse more broadly.
Historical Context
Coercive Activities
One thing that has not been much noted in recent years is that malign foreign influence in our elections has been a concern since the Founding of our Republic. Using the 3C’s framework, I want to start with coercive activities.
Going all the way back in 1787, when the Founders were debating the merits of “our new Constitution,” Thomas Jefferson told John Adams that he was “apprehensive of foreign interference, intrigue, influence.” Adams too worried that “as often as elections happen, the danger of foreign influence recurs.” Nine years later, the two squared off in the first contested presidential election in American history.
The election of 1796 occurred while Britain and revolutionary France were locked in war. Adams favored the Washington Administration’s pro-British trade policy, while Jefferson favored the French Republic. A few months before the election, in his famous farewell address, President George Washington issued a stern public warning: “Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake ….”
Nonetheless, France tried to exert its influence. The French minister to the United States, Pierre-Auguste Adet, told his superiors that he could “get out the vote for a man devoted to France.” He suggested that France should “adopt measures that will cause the merchants to fear for their property, and to make them see the need to place at the head of the government a man whose known character would inspire confidence in the [French] Republic.” On the eve of the election, Adet sent the U.S. Secretary of State a series of letters effectively threatening that France would begin to seize American merchant ships and trigger war unless Jefferson were elected. Adet had them published in the Philadelphia Aurora, one of the most widely circulated and partisan newspapers of the era.
The public threats, however, backfired. Adams “suspect[ed] they will have a contrary effect, from what he intended.” He was right; Jefferson’s confidante James Madison soon reported that Adet’s action was an “electioneering maneuver” that could risk “a perpetual alienation” of the United States and France. Jefferson’s supporters disowned “this interference” in the election, while Adams’ supporters resented it as an attempt to coerce the voters, “and their exertions against the candidate Mr. Adet was understood to favor were the more determined and the more vigorous.” Jefferson ultimately lost by three electoral votes.
Adams did not forget the risk that France’s attempted coercion posed. In his inaugural address, he implored the American people never to “lose sight of the danger” that foreign influence, whether “by flattery or menaces, by fraud or violence, by terror, intrigue, or venality,” presents to our “free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections.” The next year, Jefferson, too, objected to France’s continuing coercive efforts to stir up American partisanship, telling Madison that the efforts were “very unworthy of a great nation.” He felt that they contributed to a mistaken presumption that Jefferson’s supporters’ “first passion” was “an attachment to France, and hatred to” Adams’s party, rather than what American voters’ passion really was: “the love of their country.”
Covert or Deceptive Activities
Since the twentieth century, as the United States evolved into a superpower, malign foreign influence has been less about coercion and more about deceptive or covert efforts, meaning that the foreign government has tried to disguise or conceal its role. In the 1930s, Nazi Germany directed an extensive underground effort to influence U.S. public opinion. One German agent, for example, entered the United States claiming to be a clergyman and used Nazi funds to take over small, established newspapers and civic organizations until he was indicted for failing to register as a foreign agent and fled the country as a fugitive. Congress responded to these and similar activities by enacting the Foreign Agents Registration Act in 1938, which requires disclosure of foreign influence activities. The Justice Department successfully prosecuted some of Germany’s “most useful American agents” who tried to hide their activities.
Germany also targeted U.S. elections, including the 1940 election, which occurred while World War II raged in Europe. Nazi leaders viewed President Franklin Roosevelt as pro-British and interventionist, so they employed several “schemes for influencing the outcome of our 1940 Presidential election, as well as the platforms of both major political parties.”
One scheme entailed forging documents and fabricating stories that they hoped would capture the American public’s attention. In March 1940, the Nazis released diplomatic documents they had supposedly recovered from the Polish Foreign Office’s archives when they captured Warsaw. The documents purportedly showed that the Roosevelt Administration had promised aid to Poland before the war and assured Poland that the United States would “finish” any war on the Allies’ side. Germany’s top diplomat in the United States, Hans Thomsen, called the documents a “bombshell,” and two members of Congress demanded a congressional investigation. But most members of Congress and even the American press were more circumspect; they largely followed the advice that President Roosevelt gave when the story broke “to take all European propaganda at this time with a grain of salt,” which he immediately amended “to stretch it to two and then three grains.” In the days before the 1940 election, Germany tried to plant another fabricated story claiming evidence that Roosevelt had long been planning to intervene in Europe even before 1939, but no mainstream newspaper would take the bait.
After World War II, the Cold War produced a whole new set of challenges from malign foreign influence. The Soviet Union employed covert or deceptive tactics as part of its so-called “active measures,” a phrase it used to describe malign influence activities like disseminating forgeries, disinformation, and propaganda and sponsoring front publications to undermine American interests. Most active measures were directed abroad, such as when, just a few weeks before the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, the KGB mailed athletes from Africa forged letters supposedly from the Ku Klux Klan with threats against them, or when the Soviets published stories in dozens of Soviet-controlled publications around the world claiming that the AIDS epidemic was started by U.S. military experiments. But the Soviets also used active measures to undermine public confidence or influence public opinion in the United States, including covertly forging documents and funding conspiracy-mongering books that supposedly tied the FBI and CIA to President Kennedy’s assassination or tied FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to the Ku Klux Klan.
The Soviet Union also targeted U.S. elections. For example, during the 1976 Democratic primary, the KGB adopted a wide-ranging set of active measures to disparage Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a known anti-Soviet hawk, by instructing their agents to use confidential contacts to find “dark spots” in Jackson’s background. When they did not turn up much, the Soviets sent a forged FBI memorandum dated June 20, 1940 to the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign purportedly concluding that Jackson was secretly gay. Neither the journalists nor the Carter campaign published the phony document.
After the 1980 election, Soviet leaders soon grew to loathe and fear President Reagan’s administration, according to an ex-KGB defector, and they ordered the KGB to weaken his 1984 reelection bid. Intending to discredit President Reagan by portraying him as a McCarthyite, Soviet agents covertly sent American journalists a forged letter, dated October 15, 1947, supposedly from J. Edgar Hoover, that purportedly showed Reagan colluding with the FBI to root out Communists in Hollywood. The FBI publicly denounced the document when it surfaced in January 1984, explaining that it contained stylistic touches that Hoover would not have tolerated and violated rules for FBI correspondence. Soviet agents also covertly tried to develop contacts at the Republican and Democratic national party committees to find ways to subvert President Reagan’s campaign. In addition, they developed a package of narratives to disseminate about President Reagan, trying to portray him as a corrupt warmonger who was subservient to the military-industrial complex and responsible for tensions with NATO allies. But all of the Soviets’ efforts failed, and President Reagan was re-elected.
Corrupt Activities
So let me turn to the third “C” of malign foreign influence: corrupt measures to influence elections. One attempt was apparently made in 1968, when, according to, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, “the top Soviet leaders took an extraordinary step, unprecedented in the history of Soviet-American relations,” and ordered him to offer Vice President and Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey’s campaign secret financial aid. But when Dobrynin asked Humphrey about his campaign’s financial state, Humphrey replied that it “was more than enough for him to have Moscow’s good wishes,” and Dobrynin did not formally convey the offer. Six years later, Congress made it illegal for foreign nationals to make campaign contributions.
By the mid-1990s, that again became important when the People’s Republic of China (PRC), “undertook a covert program to influence the U.S. political process through political donations, and other means, during the 1996 election cycle.” Over Beijing’s strenuous objection, Taiwan’s President was granted a visa in 1995 to speak at his alma mater, Cornell University, after Congress passed resolutions supporting the trip. The PRC then implemented a plan to influence the U.S. political process to be more favorable toward pro-Beijing policies by making campaign donations through middlemen who could provide access to, and seek to influence, candidates and elected officials at all levels of government. The Justice Department prosecuted a number of the middlemen who were involved, and a 1999 Congressional report identified the PRC conduct as “a serious threat to our national security.”
And with regard to the 2016 election, just last week some declassified FBI documents were released by the Senate Judiciary Committee, which indicates that the Clinton campaign was warned about efforts of a foreign government to influence her through campaign contributions that “may come in a form outside established parameters for such contributions.” The threat of corrupt malign influence activities requires continued vigilance.
Comparisons with Current Media and Technologies
So malign foreign influence efforts in our elections has been a perennial problem. But though the general threat isn’t novel, some of the challenges we’re facing now are different. As President Trump put it in Executive Order 13848: “In recent years, the proliferation of digital devices and internet-based communications has created significant vulnerabilities and magnified the scope and intensity…”
Historically, malign influence operations were often limited by their reliance on third parties, such as mainstream news outlets or popular magazines, to reach sizeable segments of the American public. For much of our history, the media were cautious about being used in this way. For example, many American journalists wrote exposés about Nazi propaganda in the United States and, at least by 1940, the press was largely “immune” to it. Decades later, the FBI told Congress in 1986 that “[t]he American media is sophisticated, and generally recognizes Soviet influence attempts.” But today, the media environment is considerably different, and the internet and social media also allow foreign actors to reach unprecedented numbers of Americans covertly, inexpensively, and directly, without ever setting foot on U.S. soil. We are all now familiar with the findings that, in the 2016 election cycle, the Russian Internet Research Agency “spent a total of about $100,000 over two years on advertisements” on Facebook to promote social discord and division, and similarly placed disguised posts and tweets on several social media platforms.
While the tools of malign influence have proliferated, foreign governments such as Russia and China have also become more sophisticated and bolder. Back in 1986, the FBI told Congress that Soviet active measures had relatively little success in the United States because they were “often transparent and sometimes clumsily implemented.” Forged government documents, for instance, could be exposed. But the arsenal of modern malign influence — like impersonating Americans on social media platforms, or manipulating digital content through “deep fakes” — can be more difficult to detect and counter.
As to boldness, as the FBI Director has recently pointed out, the PRC has been “engaged in a highly sophisticated malign foreign influence campaign,” using bribery, blackmail, and other malign tactics to influence our year-round policymaking, which certainly has implications for our elections. Beijing’s corrupt methods are not always as blatant as its illegal campaign financing was in 1996; PRC tactics are more subtly pernicious and complex. Beijing, for example, works relentlessly to co-opt seemingly independent middlemen who can influence members of Congress on a host of policies.
What is being done about all these malign foreign influence efforts? Rest assured, as this old problem takes on new looks, the Department of Justice has been responding to these challenges with our own tools. I’ll mention five of them.
First, the FBI has established a Foreign Influence Task Force that brings together cross-disciplinary and cross-regional expertise, encompassing counterintelligence, cyber, criminal, and even counterterrorism agents and analysts who investigate and counter malign influence by China, Russia, Iran, and other foreign actors.
Second, the Department of Justice has been assisting social media companies, campaigns, and election officials in hardening their platforms, networks, and infrastructure against these threats, and has been providing them with defensive counterintelligence briefings and steps they can undertake to reduce their vulnerabilities.
Third, the Department of Justice has strengthened compliance efforts for the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, in order to identify and expose malign foreign influence. FARA helps to ensure transparency by requiring persons who engage in certain foreign influence-related activities to register with the department and publicly disclose those activities. It doesn’t prohibit any speech, but instead enhances the public’s and the government’s ability to evaluate foreign influence-related speech by ensuring that the source is clear.
Fourth, where malign foreign influence operations violate our federal laws, as with hacking of email systems to make their contents public, this department of Justice has brought criminal charges. The department remains prepared to bring criminal charges where they are warranted.
Fifth, the department has supported the Administration’s broader efforts to counter malign foreign influence. For example, the Administration has imposed financial sanctions for Russian efforts to sow discord in connection with the 2016 election and imposed further sanctions in the last twelve months for Russia’s additional influence operations since then. In short, the Justice Department and our colleagues in government have been adapting to foreign actors’ malign activities—and actively combatting and defending against them.
The 2020 Landscape
At this point, I want to touch briefly on the current threat landscape as we head toward Election Day. The Department of Justice, DHS, and other federal agencies, have engaged in an unprecedented level of coordination with and support to all 50 states and numerous local officials to ensure that their election infrastructure is secure. We have yet to see any activity intended to prevent voting or to change votes, and we continue to think that it would be extraordinarily difficult for foreign adversaries to change vote tallies.
We do, however, continue to see malign foreign influence efforts relevant to the 2020 presidential election. Some foreign actors are covertly trying to undermine confidence in our elections because they are authoritarian governments opposed to representative democracy. As the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) recently made public on August 7, some foreign governments have preferences about our election — and have taken or planned malign activities in support of their preferences — including efforts by China and Iran to undermine President Trump and his Administration’s policies and efforts by Russia to undermine former Vice President Biden. The Intelligence Community, including the FBI, have briefed Congress, as well as both presidential campaigns, about these threats. ODNI also has also taken unprecedented steps to educate the public about these threats to “better inform Americans so they can play a critical role in safeguarding our election.”
We are working to counter all of these influence activities. But it is important to remember that there are times when drawing attention to the threats can be precisely what the bad actors want, to generate concern and distrust, division and discord. And as Americans, we need to avoid the temptation to seek political advantage from the revelation of influence activities that were meant to divide us.
Instead, the right response is for our electorate to be knowledgeable and careful about the sources of information they rely on, to look for accurate information, to inform themselves about the candidates, and to cast their ballots accordingly. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves.” So let me offer some final thoughts about what the historical records tell us that Americans can do to protect ourselves from the malign influence efforts of foreign governments, in addition to the strong measures being taken by the Justice Department and other government agencies.
Advice from Our Predecessors
First, we just need to be aware that malign foreign influence efforts have always existed and they still do. It’s one of the warnings that President George Washington shared when he counseled Americans that “against the insidious wiles of foreign influence … the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake.”
Second, this means we should not take information from foreign governments or questionable sources at face value. Information from countries or regions that have a history of propaganda, should be taken with “a grain of salt,” if not “two and then three grains,” as President Franklin Roosevelt said. We’ve been warning the public that “some foreign governments” have a track record of spreading fabricated stories, misinformation, and propaganda to try to shape voter perceptions, and the Intelligence Community continues to share information about what those governments are doing in 2020. All Americans can control what information they rely on and can exercise care by evaluating that information with a critical eye.
Finally, while we must remain vigilant, Americans should not be deterred from participating in elections by concerns of malign foreign influence efforts. All Americans, in the end, can control who they vote for. Foreign propaganda and other influence activities have been concerns since the founding of our Republic, but they are challenges that we’ve been successfully navigating for more than two hundred years. The measures I’ve outlined today can help us to do so once again this year.
“We don’t know where the FBI is, perhaps we need a new agency to protect us,” Rudy Giuliani said on Thursday.
The legal team for President Donald J. Trump held a press conference on Thursday at noon, led by Rudy Giuliani who told people they have statistical data that proves cheating in the Presidential election, Giuliani said, “but also many sworn avadavats that prove there was a plan to execute plans of voter fraud especially in big cities controlled by Democrats with a long history of fraud.”
Giuliani pointed to numerous convictions of voter fraud that were already prosecuted, “The fraud was done in cities controlled by Democrats, where they control law enforcement and voting boards like in Pennsylvania where we have a margin of victory now, which is a fraud, that is 69,040 votes,” he said suggesting that cleaning up the fraud will erase that lead.
“We have a testimony that there was no inspection of those 69,000 ballots, and mail votes are suspect to fraud, which Jimmy Carter and Justice Souter and even the New York Time said had a danger of mail, and we make this case when we have done mail-in voting en mass. It is dangerous especially if you have a plan or scheme, as Joe Biden said a few days before the election.,” Giuliani said making reference to Democrat Joe Biden slip when he told people the Democrats had “the best voter fraud scheme”.
“They made many mistakes as all crooks do- start by pushing Republicans out- even in third worlds, they don’t push others out. Recounts will tell us nothing because we do not have signatures to look at, which we always looked at in the past. They were not inspected, and they need to be removed from the totals; these ballots could come from anyone or many ballots from one person. Bush V. Gore being the most recent case, he said.
“That is not the only fraud in PA. For example, if you made a mistake and lived in some places, you could fix it in Democrat states; one of our plaintiffs, Mr. Henry, testified that in a Republican area, he was not allowed to fix it. The Democrat secretary of State made-up rules, and it is easily provable with hundred to thousands of witnesses on that,” he said.
“15,000 people in Pittsburg, according to the Democrat election machine, had been told they had already voted. We have witnesses to testify that they were told they already voted when they showed up to vote, and they will testify. 50-60 witnesses who were not allowed to inspect the ballots, who were pushed and assaulted, placed far away, and corraled. They were too far away, witnesses swore under penalty of perjury that these things happened. They swear they were not allowed to carry out their functions as inspectors. Why would you not allow them to carry their functions because those ballots were being used to catch Biden up by 700,000 votes?” Giuliani said.
“In Michigan, we have testimony from Jessie Jacob, that gave us an affidavit the coverage of this is as dishonest as the crime of the election. A fine woman, who is giving out her name, and we know that people who will be threatened and the media’s censorship is making things worse. A woman was assigned to voting duties and trained to cheat. She says she was assigned to change the date on balots. She this under oath. This is direct evidence. This is not circumstantial. Biden’s people can cross-examine her, but you can not say there is no evidence. This is public information. We believe illegal immigrants and out-of-state people were voting in Michigan and places like Camden, New Jersey. They carried these places in corrupt cities, not in places where they respect the law,” he said.
MORE FROM RUDY:
“Justice Alito said that the ballots that come in after a certain time had to be placed aside. We have a testimony that says that Alito’s order was violated, sworn to under the penalty of perjury,” Giuliani said. “People are afraid of having their names out in public because goons go after them, and the media condones it, so that is a problem. There are many more, and the media needs to read them and not falsely report there is no evidence.”
“People ran to what they thought was food trucks, carrying ballots at 4 AM, and we have people who will swear that the ballots were only for Biden with no down tickets with nothing on the outer envelope; we have between 60,000-100,000 ballots that were counted up to three times. We have three American citizens who will go to court and swear to it.”
We can specifically identify up to 300,000 votes, which is more than the margin, and they went through Detroit. Constantino and the City of Detroit, not by us but by a private citizen with sword testimony. Constantino, et al. v City of Detroit.
“Wisconson is a petition, that claims there was no inspection allowed, many precincts with over-votes. The clearest sign of fraud is, for example, where there is 200% of registered voters who have voted. Classically it is considered over-voting 80%; we have 200%-300% of overvotes, as in Wayne, Michigan, and Wisconsin. There is a massive fraud.”
“Georgia will file a lawsuit going to be filed by Trump legal team, inspections cast aside, double voters, out of state voters, and specific evidence in voting and intimidation changes.”
“We are collecting evidence still most likely to file suit there and significant allegations in Virginia and New Mexico. We have provable illegal ballots, so look at the lawsuits. Looks at the affidavits. I have at least 10, and we have 1,000, and there is more that we can not reveal.”
“But this is enough to look into these issues. There also seems to be a plan on handling legal observers by putting them into a pin, not allowing them to see the ballots. It is clearly a plan, and there was a Freudian slip by the candidate- this had to be planned, and was there a contractor to get the same pen to put the observers in. We use a Venuzualla machine to cont the votes. The people deleted Donald Trump, and Biden is in the lead because of the illegal ballots produced, and we will prove it in court.”
The Media is refusing to cover legitimate cases of voter fraud, so @RudyGiuliani just held a press conference and brought it right to their faces.
“In our election, Cuba and China’s have a massive influence on Communist money, and it is the Dominion and Smartmatic software to help keep Chavez from losing. We have a strong witness to tell us how it works and they are in the pleadings of Lin Woon in Georgia – stunning affidavit, and the eyewitness was with Chavez when they developed these systems. He knew that when he saw the states close down from counting, we were going through the same things,” Powell said.
“The testimony matches numerous eyewitness testimony who said they saw ballots come in at the time when counting stopped, and we have statistical evidence to prove there was a change. Dominion is not to be found now, but we know that there are ties to the Clinton Foundation and other politicians to Dominion. We know this from a written letter read from testimony about Smartmatic, and the company has hidden offshore and hidden entities, and is own by Chaves and is Communistic,” she said.
MORE FROM POWELL:
Experts have found that Smartmatic has end-user vulnerabilities and change to whatever they want. They can weigh votes differently; they could have changed the entire election. The machines had to shut down because of so many votes for Trump, and they had to backfill the votes for Biden, so we only know about all of this time. The software manual, which you can get from the internet, spells it out. The machines are easily accessible to anyone- there has been no oversight, even videos on how a kid with a phone could hack it. You can drop and drop a batch to throw away or assign to a different candidate. We have proof of Biden being given votes and batches of Trump votes being dumped.
Many people working on elections might not have known, but many did. Hence, we need a widescale criminal investigation, different benefits that used taxpayer money to get Dominion machines and election insurance, who used the machines. Texas denied certification in 2019 with Dominion systems. Other software is embedded in the source code in all machines, and no doubt there is evidence of use in the other corrupt counties. This is stunning and heartbreaking, infuriating, and most unpatriotic acts for people to have participated in; the American public is fed up with the corruption. we are not going to back down, and we will clean it up. We will reclaim the country who vote for freedom.
Folks, @SidneyPowell1 just brought the ??? right to the media's face.
“I can tell you what the media will say, they will say that there is not sufficient evidence of fraud, or that we talked too long; this, what we are doing today, is an opening statement; this is not a law and order episode where everything is wrapped up in 60 minutes. What we are telling you is what the networks have been hiding, by hiding the merits of this case- our objection is to preserve safe elections. We are going to make sure that election integrity is preserved and if your fake news network is not allowing you to the core, ask why.
We have a case that could take years to develop, and we go thru the process; we are not trying our case in the court of public opinion. You are not unbiased jurors. Your opinion does not matter; you need to allow coverage of our legal team. I can anticipate what your headlines will be. You are unacceptable; this is an opening statement; we tell you what the evidence will show- the American people need to know what we have uncovered in a few weeks. We are a nation of rules, not rulers. There is not someone who gets to pick a president outside of the American people. The states legislature and all of the way up to change the rules that are what Democrats do if they can t win they change the rules. Hamilton Fed 68 on the electoral college, We want to protect election integrity and are proud of President Trump. He swore an oath to protect and defend the US Constitution awe is confident we will get to victory. Still, we will also protect the election process, and this I not overturn an election. We are the represents here standing in the gap and defending the American people, and this is about the unites States of American; we won’t back down. The PRess needs to cover this fairly- it matters. This is an overview; we have time, and we will show the Constitutional process. The election is irredeemably compromised.
Trump Lawyer @JennaEllisEsq just looked the media dead in the eyes and HAMMERED them for refusing to cover voter fraud they clearly laid out.
President Donald J. Trump announced that he would not be participating in the second Presidential Debate because the Debate Commission decided to take the debate viral, using the excuse that Trump had COVID.
“I’m not going to waste my time on a virtual debate. It’s not what debating is all about,” Trump reportedly said on the Fox Business Channel. “It’s ridiculous.”
The event will be at a town hall-style meeting with Trump and Biden at a remote location and is still scheduled for Oct. 15 at Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, in Miami, Florida.
Many people online were reacting to the news that it was suspicious that the Debate Commission chose to go viral for the obvious issue that doing so allows Biden a great opportunity to get a lot of assistance from a teleprompter.
The Media was uick to report on Biden’s response, very early in the morning, showing their bias:
The announcement was timed to be made shortly before Trump was on TV with Maria Bartiromo, very early in the morning, hinting at a bit of collusion with the Democrat Party.
The announcement from the Commission on Presidential Debates cited a need “to protect the health and safety of all involved with the second presidential debate.” The candidates will “participate from separate remote locations” while the participants and moderator remain in Miami, it said.
Twitter had the topic trending immediately showing the importance of the topic to the left, and the media/Tech/ Democrat alliance.
The AP had a story out quickly, before Trump could say anything, showing their alliance with the left:
The Media will no doubt be breathless to discredit Trump over their set up, however, even the Presidential Commission says they are really irrelevant by admitting, “No presidential candidate is required to debate. Jimmy Carter refused to debate during the first debate in 1980. It is up to the individual candidate,” Commission on Presidential Debates Chairman Frank Fahrenkopf said.
The two debates in October, the first presidential and vice-presidential debates were not well received by the public, and Biden has had numerous blunders while speaking over the past few months, leading many people to wonder if the set up to push Trump off the debate is a tactic to help Biden.
POLITICAL STRATEGISTS REACT
“A glorified zoom call is not a debate & it’s an insufficient platform for electing the leader of the free world. America deserves 3 in person debates. If the Commission’s decision is really about concern over Trump’s positive Covid test, then why not just push the date back?” Andrew Suriban posted, in reaction to the news.
“The rule still applies. If you’re winning, don’t debate. If you’re losing, debate,” Rick Tyler said
Watch Jason Miller for furter reaction from the Trump team… this story is developing…
The Department of Justice is investigating several “very big” voter fraud investigations in multiple states but has yet to give out any details. AG Bill Barr refused to give specific details about the investigations. He did confirm that he is aware of several voter fraud investigations and that some are pretty big.
At least 32 people were successfully tried and convicted of voter fraud in 2019. And just this week, 19 people were arrested and charged with illegally voting in 2016. They are illegal aliens. This was in part due to questioning from Wolf Blitzer on the possibility of voter fraud in 2020 with Wolf Blitzer. They have a limited time in which to charge people because if Biden wins all of these cases will just fade away.
Barr told Blitzer that mail-in voting could be opening the door to voter fraud. Blitzer tried to spin it as a partisan myth but Barr fired right back. Jimmy Carter and his selected panel decided that ,mail-in balloting is the most vulnerable method for voting. Barr pointed to a recent election that had 1,700 fraudulent ballots.
Barr pointed out that there is a huge difference between absentee voting and wholesale mail-in voting. In absentee voting, ballots are requested for a specific address. Mail-in ballots are mailed out to everyone on the voter registration lists which are wildly inaccurate. But, to make matters worse, some states are trying to do away with checking signatures on the ballots with the signatures on their voter registration cards.
Barr said:
“I know there are a number of investigations right now, some very big ones, in states.”
“We haven’t had the kind of widespread use of mail-in ballots as being proposed. We’ve had absentee ballots from people who request them from a specific address. Now what we’re talking about is mailing them to everyone on the voter list, when everyone knows those voter lists are inaccurate.”
“This is playing with fire. We’re a very closely divided country here and people have to have confidence in the results of the election and the legitimacy of the government. And people trying to change the rules to this methodology—which as a matter of logic is very open to fraud and coercion—is reckless and dangerous.”
In Paterson, New Jersey four people have been arrested for massive voter fraud. 19% of all ballots were fake. A federal judge has ordered the city to hold a new election. In Texas in 2018 nine people were arrested in a voter fraud scheme. Despite all the evidence, the Democrats would have you believe that mail-in balloting voter fraud does not exist.
If you look at the voting records from 2016, you will see that it would not take many votes to swing some of the states. One person could change an election, but three or four could overturn an entire state. It could also affect the down-ticket races, but local races could feel it the most. The fraud in Paterson proves that but liberals will tell you that you can’t believe your lying eyes.
Between the ballot harvesters, the dead, and illegal aliens, the opportunity for fraud is massive.
President Donald Trump opposes a universal vote-by-mail election, arguing that it’s an invitation for fraud and opens the door to Election Day chaos due to the inefficiency of the U.S. Postal Service.
Democrats are waging a well-funded legal campaign across the nation to make it easier to vote by mail beyond absentee ballots. They are litigating at least 80 of the more than 100 vote-by-mail court cases across the nation.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said his party has more than 600 lawyers working on election-related cases.
Yesterday, President Trump in a joint announcement with Israel and the UAE announced a peace deal that restores full normalization between the two Middle Eastern countries.
Joe Biden praised the deal but only because he wanted to claim credit for the deal.
Biden claims that it was his work in meeting directly with representatives of Israel and the UAE set up the peace deal that was signed yesterday. But is there any truth to that at all? Not really. If there was a deal to be reached, the Obama/Biden administration had eight years to do it in and Obama was the most anti-Semitic president since Jimmy Carter.
Biden said:
The coming together of Israel and Arab states builds on the efforts of multiple administrations to foster a broader Arab-Israeli opening, including the efforts of the Obama-Biden administration to build on the Arab Peace Initiative. I personally spent time with leaders of both Israel and UAE during our administration building the case for cooperation and broader engagement and the benefits it could deliver to both nations, and I am gratified by today’s announcement.
Boxer Jerry Quarry fought both Ali and Frazier but lost both fights. Ali and Frazier went on to lose fights, could Quarry take credit for those losses? According to Joe Biden’s logic he could. But losing is not the impetus of success. A football team does not get credit for a touchdown because they made it to the ten-yard line.
The most exciting thing about the peace deal that was made yesterday is that no one wanted to be the first to make peace with Israel. Now that someone has already taken the step, it will be easier for other countries, especially enemies of Iran to do the same. In fact, President Trump said there could be another treaty in a matter of days.
In fact, the Israel-UAE peace deal was impossible during the Obama-Biden administration, for two reasons. The first was that Obama and Biden insisted on criticizing and condemning Israel, creating “distance” between the U.S. and the Israeli government. Biden himself was the administration’s point man in attacking Israel over its housing policy in Jerusalem.
The second reason was the Iran nuclear deal. The “agreement” — which was never signed by anyone — allowed Iran to become a nuclear power after a decade or so, and did nothing to stop Iran from threatening the Sunni Arab states. The U.S. lost leverage with the Sunni Arab states as a result. To the extent Israel and the UAE moved closer during the Obama-Biden administration, that was because the U.S. allowed the Iranian regime to become a greater threat to both.
The main difference between the liberals and my President Donald Trump is that liberals promise but Trump delivers.
VIENNA (Bloomberg) — America turned into a net oil exporter last week, breaking 75 years of continued dependence on foreign oil and marking a pivotal — even if likely brief — moment toward what U.S. President Donald Trump has branded as “energy independence.”
The shift to net exports is the dramatic result of an unprecedented boom in American oil production, with thousands of wells pumping from the Permian region of Texas and New Mexico to the Bakken in North Dakota to the Marcellus in Pennsylvania.
While the country has been heading in that direction for years, this week’s dramatic shift came as data showed a sharp drop in imports and a jump in exports to a record high. Given the volatility in weekly data, the U.S. will likely remain a small net importer most of the time.
“We are becoming the dominant energy power in the world,” said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research. “But, because the change is gradual over time, I don’t think it’s going to cause a huge revolution, but you do have to think that OPEC is going to have to take that into account when they think about cutting.”
The shale revolution has transformed oil wildcatters into billionaires and the U.S. into the world’s largest petroleum producer, surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia. The power of OPEC has been diminished, undercutting one of the major geopolitical forces of the last half century. The cartel and its allies are meeting in Vienna this week, trying to make a tough choice to cut output and support prices, risking the loss of more market share to the U.S.
The U.S. sold overseas last week a net 211,000 bpd of crude and refined products such as gasoline and diesel, compared to net imports of more than 2 MMbpd on average so far in 2018, and an annual peak of more than 12 MMbpd in 2005, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The EIA said the U.S. has been a net oil importer in weekly data going back to 1991 and monthly data starting in 1973. Oil historians that have compiled even older annual data using statistics from the American Petroleum Institute said the country has been a net oil importer since 1949, when Harry Truman was at the White House.
On paper, the shift to net oil imports means that the U.S. is today energy independent, achieving a rhetorical aspiration for generations of American politicians, from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush. Yet, it’s a paper tiger achievement: In reality, the U.S. remains exposed to global energy prices, still affected by the old geopolitics of the Middle East.
While the net balance shows the U.S. is selling more petroleum than buying, American refiners continue to buy millions of barrels each day of overseas crude and fuel. The U.S. imports more than 7 MMbpd of crude from all over the globe to help feed its refineries, which consume more than 17 MMbbl each day. In turn, the U.S. has become the world’s top fuel supplier.
“The U.S. is now a major player in the export market,” said Brian Kessens, who helps manage $16 billion at Tortoise in Leawood, Kansas. “We continue to re-tool our export infrastructure along the Gulf Coast to expand capacity, and you continue to see strong demand globally for crude oil.”
