On today's BradCast: When you're a monopoly power company --- especially in Florida --- they let you do it, I guess. [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]

Before we get to the massive scandal(s) unspooling this week in Florida, a few other notes about corrupt media and corrupt power brokers. Donald Trump's favorite "Big Lie" fake news network, One American News (OAN), looks to be on the brink of going out of business, after Verizon joined AT&T to stop carrying their programming this weekend. Sad! At the same time, Trump is threatening to sue actual news network, CNN, because they repeatedly reported on his "Big Lie" attempts to steal the 2020 election. Good luck with that.

Then, it's on to the mind-blowing story out of the Sunshine State this week, where a leak of thousands of documents from a consulting firm in Alabama, has revealed all sorts of corruption by Florida Power & Light (FPL), the state's monopoly public utility company. The Florida papers are having a field day as they comb through the documents, publishing damning exposé after damning exposé on the dirt they are finding, which goes all the way up to FLP President and CEO, Eric Silagy, who, according to our guest today, incredibly enough, still has his job!

The documents were released amid a power battle over Montgomery, AL-based Matrix, LLC, a "powerful but little-known political consulting firm that has operated behind the scenes in at least eight states," according to the Guardian. They reveal a boatload of corruption by FPL, its CEO and many of its executive, including running "ghost candidates" in elections, mounting disinformation campaigns to maintain their monopoly (for example, to oppose residential solar power in the Sunshine State!) and secretly taking over pretty much full control of an "independent", right-leaning "news" site in Tallahassee called The Capitolist.

The website (which is still online, also incredibly enough) has been influential for years among Florida lawmakers. Its editor and founder is a guy by the name of Brian Burgess, the former Communications Director for FL's former Governor, now U.S. Senator Rick Scott. According to a deep dive from the Miami Herald, Burgess was being paid some $12,000 a month by FPL --- via a web of third parties cut-outs, including the consulting firm Matrix --- to publish its propaganda, push its preferred (sometimes fake) candidates, and ruthlessly attack its opponents, including both elected officials and reporters who dared publish stories the power company didn't like.

For insight into this (these) still unfolding scandal (scandals), we're joined today by ALISSA JEAN SCHAFER, the FL-based Research and Communications Manager for the Energy and Policy Institute, a non-profit "watchdog organization working to expose attacks on renewable energy and counter misinformation by fossil fuel and utility interests". Her organization certainly has its work cut out for it with this gobsmacking "web of scandal," as Schafer describes it.

"If you are a Floridian," she notes, "you have no choice who your power company is. We are in a monopoly market. So if you have Florida Power & Light, you're stuck with them. You're paying that bill every month. If you're seeing these headlines, I don't know understand how you can NOT be furious."

"It's kind of a crazy state. People like to make fun of us," concedes Schafer. "But at the end of the day, there are a lot of folks that are being impacted by this nonsense. We have elections coming up, and how are people supposed to know that their votes aren't being manipulated by these fake candidates that are being propped up by dark money. It's a very real concern."

Among those fake candidates, as the Herald reports, was one who was "running" against state Senator José Javier Rodríguez, who proposed legislation to allow landlords to sell cheap rooftop solar power directly to tenants. "I want you to make his life a living hell … seriously,” wrote FPL’s CEO Silagy in a 2019 email to two of his vice-presidents. They then ran a third-party candidate with the same last name as Rodriguez, who split the vote. The state Senator was pushed out of his job by just 32 votes. FPL's "ghost candidate" later admitted he had been bribed to put his name on the ballot.

There is a lot to discuss today with Schafer on all of this, including how FPL is claiming they broke no laws; their ridiculous claim that rate-payer money wasn't actually used to hoax rate-payers through these schemes; and how The Capitolist's editor Burgess is able to claim with a straight face that he has "never pitched nor solicited feedback from FPL executives on any story or business venture" and has "never received a story pitch from any FPL executive." (Of course not. That's what Matrix was for! And they were in near daily communications with FPL execs, according to the leaked documents.)

"If we take a step back and look at our investor-owned utilities across the country, whether they are working with Matrix or not, this is a playbook that we do see time and time again," Schafer explains. "You have a consulting firm as the middle-man to do some of the dirty work, because utilities don't want their name on it. They want to be able to say, 'I never spoke to XYZ.' They can say that because they spoke to the consultant who then spoke to XYZ. You have similar trends of setting up shell companies to pass money through, so that it looks like the utility is just being a utility and not actually a political operative."

Finally today, Mitch McConnell is apparently furious at being out-foxed by Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on this week's surprise agreement with Sen. Joe Manchin for a major tax, healthcare and climate deal called the Inflation Reduction Act. McConnell and his fellow Senate Republicans decided to take it out on sick combat veterans who were exposed to deadly chemicals and toxic burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan by voting against healthcare protections for them. Former Daily Show host and actual supporter of America's veterans, Jon Stewart, had a word or two for those Republican Senators at the Capitol on Thursday morning, including: "If this is America First, then America is fucked."

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

MONTHLY BRAD BLOG SUBSCRIPTION	ONE-TIME DONATION
Choose monthly amount... $10 : $10.00 USD - monthly$20 : $20.00 USD - monthly$50 : $50.00 USD - monthly$100 : $100.00 USD - monthly	(Snail mail support to "Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028" always welcome too!)

Sending our love and best wishes to get better soon today to our regular BradCast guest host, Nicole Sandler, who cracked a couple of ribs over the weekend, so wasn't able to fill in for us on yesterday's show as previously planned. But, we're back today with --- you'll be shocked to learn --- lots of news to cover! [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

Among today's many stories of note...

• Our global climate emergency continues to worsen, as it's been hitting the U.S. --- in addition to Europe and Asia --- hard over the past week or two. In addition to record high temps in the Midwest, South and Northeast in recent days (some of which may be seeing some relief), after two weeks of record heat, more than 9 inches of rain fell on my old hometown of St. Louis, Missouri today, smashing a century-old record. Flash-flooding is predicted to occur in various places from Kansas to West Virginia, Virginia to Tennessee this week, and triple-digit temps will once again slam the usually-cool Pacific Northwest. It's a climate in chaos that will only get worse until (or IF) we do something to slow the burning of climate warming fossil fuels.

• Just one state, North Carolina, is holding elections today, runoffs in a number of municipal contests. Next Tuesday will be very busy, however, with primary voting in Ohio, Arizona, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri and Washington state. Over the weekend, AP called last week's 10-way Democratic gubernatorial primary in Maryland for Oprah-endorsed Wes Moore, the former CEO of an anti-poverty nonprofit. He would become the state's first black Governor if he defeats Trump-endorsed, insurrection-promoting, 2020 election-denying, right-winger Dan Cox. Last week, Cox defeated the centrist Republican candidate endorsed by the state's current, popular, two-term Republican Governor, Larry Hogan, to win the party's Gubernatorial nomination. This, like the Governor's race in Pennsylvania (more on that below), now becomes another very critical state for Democrats to win in 2022 in order to help stave off the threat of election theft in 2024 by a Republican who has said he would not have certified Joe Biden's victory in 2020, had he been Governor at the time, even though Biden won MD by more than 33 points.

• Longtime listeners and readers know we always warn after Election Days that problems with voting and tabulation systems sometimes do not appear until days or weeks (or longer) after Election Day. We've got a doozy of an example of that today, on the heels of the June 28 primaries in Illinois where, in Winnebago County, all the referendums on the ballot that day falsely appeared to have been adopted by more than 90% of the vote. Luckily, in this case, hand-marked paper ballots used in the County and cast by some 20,000 voters, ended up saving the day, allowing votes to ultimately be counted correctly as cast, even after the computer tabulators didn't. We explain.

• BREAKING THIS AFTERNOON: New York Times has obtained previously undisclosed emails between top Trump allies organizing what even they described as a "fake" electors plot in seven states after the 2020 election, in hopes of stealing it for their man. Members on the email chain acknowledged that the phony electoral votes "aren't legal under federal law", but they hoped to spring them on Dems and media anyway "so that members of Congress can fight about whether they should be counted on January 6th." The plotters included a bunch of GOP attorneys, state GOP party officials, Trump campaign staffers and activists and included Rudy Giuliani and Trump's Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. They all knew about it, and they all knew that it was unlawful. The plot also included Doug Mastriano, who, the Times reports, served as the point person for the fake elector scheme in Pennsylvania. Mastriano is now the pre-disgraced, far-right, Christian Nationalist Republican nominee for Governor in the Keystone State.

• All of that, as both the criminal probe and the House Jan. 6 Committee's investigation of the deletion of Secret Service text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021 heats up and as President Biden, said to be quickly improving from his bout with COVID, offered remarks on video tape to a black law enforcement group in Florida on Monday, about Trump's refusal to stop the insurrection or even condemn the rioters he incited (as the J6 Committee went further in revealing over the weekend.) As Biden correctly told the cops in FL: "You can't be pro-insurrection and pro-cop. You can't be pro-insurrection and pro-democracy. You can't be pro-insurrection and pro-American."

• Finally, Desi Doyen has our latest Green News Report, with news on a huge new wildfire which has exploded near Yosemite; a new study finding concurrent heat waves are now six times more frequent thanks to climate change; and new details on a 2020 pipeline spill in Charlotte, North Carolina which now turns out to have been 30 times larger than previously known --- making it the largest inland spill in U.S. history...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

MONTHLY BRAD BLOG SUBSCRIPTION	ONE-TIME DONATION
Choose monthly amount... $10 : $10.00 USD - monthly$20 : $20.00 USD - monthly$50 : $50.00 USD - monthly$100 : $100.00 USD - monthly	(Snail mail support to "Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028" always welcome too!)

There were almost too many clear and present dangers to fit into today's BradCast. But we did our best. Buckle up. [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]

Among them...

• Trump-endorsed 2020 election denier, Dan Cox, named as winner of Maryland's GOP gubernatorial primary. Democrats rejoice...but should they?

• A bipartisan team of U.S. Senators, lead by Maine Republican Susan Collins and West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, strike a deal to reform the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to clarify, in theory, that Vice Presidents may not steal elections during joint sessions of Congress to confirm Electoral College votes. We are, let's say, skeptically optimistic.

• Brazil's far-right autocratic President Jair Bolsonaro --- loved by Trump and Tucker Carlson of Fox 'News' alike --- goes full Trump in declaring that his re-election contest in about 75 days, in which he is predicted to lose by a landslide, will be marred by massive fraud requiring military intervention to sort out.

• It's not looking good for Steve Bannon in his Contempt of Congress trial. It is looking much better, however, for those who believe in accountability and the rule of law.

• It's also not looking good for a whole passel of conspirators who attempted to help Trump steal the 2020 Presidential election in Georgia, including Rudy Giuliani, Sen. Lindsey Graham, whose attempts to quash their subpoenas have failed so far, and 16 GOP fake electors now designated by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis as "targets" in the special grand jury probe.

• GOPers in the House and Senate are squirming today, as House Democrats play some excellent hard ball (for a change) by calling votes on the Respect for Marriage Act, to give federal statutory protection to both same-sex and interracial marriage, and the Right to Contraception Act. Republicans are outraged --- OUTRAGED! --- that they're being forced to take a public stance on these issues during an election year, after SCOTUS recently made clear those previously Constitutionally-established rights may now be on their chopping block as well, following their corrupt overturning of Roe v. Wade.

• Following the corrupt SCOTUS majority gutting the ability of the EPA to regulate carbon, and the corrupt Joe Manchin gutting Joe Biden and the Democrats' critical climate change agenda, the President announced plans for Executive Actions to take on the crisis which he describes (correctly) as a "clear and present danger"...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

MONTHLY BRAD BLOG SUBSCRIPTION	ONE-TIME DONATION
Choose monthly amount... $10 : $10.00 USD - monthly$20 : $20.00 USD - monthly$50 : $50.00 USD - monthly$100 : $100.00 USD - monthly	(Snail mail support to "Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028" always welcome too!)

I don't relish saying "I told ya so" on The BradCast. But, in today's lead story, unfortunately, I have to yet again. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among the news stories covered on today's program...

• We've been telling you for months that West Virginia's corrupt Democratic U.S. Senator Joe Manchin --- whose family makes millions from the coal industry and campaign rakes in millions from the fossil fuel industry --- never had any intention of allowing any environmental measures to pass that might actually help reduce the deadly emissions that are causing our climate crisis. Nonetheless, his fellow Democrats and corporate media, like Charlie Brown, seem to keep buying his BS claims that he really really wants to adopt environmental provisions and raise taxes on the wealthy to help pay for them. After months of more pretend negotiations, Lucy pulled the football away from Charlie Brown yet again on Thursday night.

• Gas prices are finally falling. Will Joe Biden get credit for that, since he was inappropriately blamed for Big Oil's record profits from war profiteering and price gouging? (Which all Republicans in Congress refused to outlaw recently?)

• Texas' privatized, unregulated electric grid is on the brink of collapse yet again, thanks to record heat (which is thanks to a fossil fuel industry-sponsored climate crisis that all Republicans and Democrat Joe Manchin refuse to do anything about.) Will Lone Star State voters this November finally figure out who is to blame for the outages --- and hundreds of deaths that continue to come with them --- during both extreme heat and cold in the state?

• Oh, look! The Secret Service seem to have accidentally erased all of their text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021, even after the Dept. of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General asked to see them. Luckily, not much happened over those days that the American people would very much like to know about.

• Oh, look! A D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer has reportedly testified to the bipartisan U.S. House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 insurrection and Donald Trump's other attempts to steal the election that there was a physical altercation with Secret Service officials inside Trump's limo when he wanted to go to the Capitol instead of back to the White House that day. The alleged under-oath corroboration has so far received much less corporate media notice than the anonymous, still-unnamed person at the Service who claimed that Cassidy Hutchinson was lying during her explosive public testimony late last month about what she'd been told about the incident just after it happened. And the Secret Service officials who were supposed to come forward to dispute her story to the Committee have still failed to do so. (Sure would have been helpful if the Service hadn't erased their text messages from that day.)

• Mesa County, Colorado's disgraced County Clerk (and recently failed GOP candidate for Secretary of State), Tina Peters, is in yet more legal trouble. The easily-duped MAGA election fraud conspiracy theorist --- now charged with 7 felonies and 3 misdemeanors related to her orchestrating an illicit scheme to unlawfully copy and publicly distribute very sensitive voting system software last year --- had a warrant issued for her arrest by a Judge on Thursday after she left the state without court permission to speak at another evidence-free MAGA election fraud conspiracy conference in Vegas.

• But the actual election fraud perpetrated by GOP officials running for office continues. Just a few short weeks after 5 of the 10 Republicans running for the Gubernatorial nomination in Michigan were struck from the ballot for turning in tens of thousands of fraudulent petition signatures, it's happened again. This time in New York. The GOP nominee for Governor, U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin --- who voted against confirming Joe Biden's 2020 Electoral College victory and whose website features a "Team Zeldin Election Integrity Task Force" page, vowing to work "around the clock now and into November to ensure we have fair elections" --- apparently turned in nearly 13,000 fraudulent petition signatures, including 900 pages of photocopies of signatures, in hopes of appearing on the Independent Party ballot line this fall. The Libertarian Party challenged the fraudulent signatures and the state Board of Elections confirmed the fraud, denying Zeldin a third line on the November ballot.

• Finally, Desi Doyen has our latest Green News Report, with a passel of climate related stories that are so grim, we can't even bring ourselves to tease them here. On the other hand, she does have one pretty good piece of news out of California...so there's that!

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

MONTHLY BRAD BLOG SUBSCRIPTION	ONE-TIME DONATION
Choose monthly amount... $10 : $10.00 USD - monthly$20 : $20.00 USD - monthly$50 : $50.00 USD - monthly$100 : $100.00 USD - monthly	(Snail mail support to "Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028" always welcome too!)

We've got a grab bag of news items on today's BradCast, though almost all of it ends up making the same case: 'Both sides' are decidedly not the same. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

We kick off with some listener mail, critical of our recent show discussing why it's so deadly important to elect Democrats in 2022 in order to have any chance of saving American democracy itself --- and much more along with it --- before 2024. The listener argues that, in fact, democracy no longer exists in the U.S. following 2010's Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court. He argues that "both of the two major parties" are now so corrupted that "the chances of non-corporate funded candidates" being elected to national office are now "equivalent to nil". While that may come as a surprise to folks like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders, just to name a couple, there are many other reasons our correspondent couldn't be more wrong. We explain why.

The bulk of the news items in the rest of today's program underscore why that lazy "both sides are the same" notion (while founded in fragments of cynically misreported truths) is dangerously wrong. They also underscore how those on the Left who buy into that self-defeating nonsense are being played as assuredly as Donald Trump and his MAGA buddies have played their own gullible supporters.

Among those news stories covered today...

• Elected Republicans members of the Texas state House, ironically calling themselves the "Texas Freedom Caucus," have sent a letter to a Dallas law firm threatening them with legal "consequences" including "felony criminal prosecution and disbarment" for reimbursing their own employees for out-of-state travel as needed to obtain an abortion, now that Texas Republicans have ended such rights and personal freedoms for residents of the Lone Star State.

• A Donald Trump-appointed federal judge has laughed Steve Bannon's attempt to delay his pending federal trial out of the courtroom. The trial, on two counts of Contempt of Congress in response to the former Trump aide's unlawful refusal to respond to subpoenas from the bipartisan U.S. House Select Committee investigating the January 6 insurrection and Trump's many failed attempts to steal the 2020 election, is scheduled to begin next week and could result in up to two years in prison for Bannon.

• At the same time, Mother Jones has obtained leaked audio of Bannon speaking to supporters of his Chinese billionaire pal/funder three days before the 2020 election, explaining that Trump planned to declare victory, whether he won the election or not, and pretend to be the victim of fraud. "He's gonna say they stole it...he's not going out easy...Trump is gonna do some crazy shit," Bannon promised (sound familiar?), as they all laughed about what would become the most dangerous assault on American democracy in our history.

• DoJ has sued Arizona for violations of the National Voter Registration Act and Civil Rights Act, following the signing of a new voter suppression law earlier this year. Adopted by the state's GOP-dominated state legislature and signed by its Republican Governor, the new measure would block voters from voting in the 2024 election without first presenting documents proving their citizenship.

• Wisconsin's GOP-dominated state Supreme Court finds absentee ballot drop-boxes are now illegal in the Badger State. Donald Trump declares the ruling to be proof that he actually won Wisconsin in 2020! (He didn't.) And a Republican state lawmaker running for Governor vows to reverse the state's election results in response.

• In Georgia, a pathetic audio clip from the Republican Party's U.S. Senate nominee, Hershel Walker, discussing climate change --- ("Since we don't control the air, our good air decided to float over to China's bad air. So when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then...now we got we to clean that back up.") --- underscores, once again, the sad, cynical (and ill-considered) scheme by GOPers to push this seemingly mentally ill former football star as their candidate to run against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock this fall.

• And finally, Desi Doyen has our latest Green News Report, as wildfires once again threaten California's iconic Giant Sequoias; Utah's Great Salt Lake is drying up; and offshore wind power is booming...in China...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

MONTHLY BRAD BLOG SUBSCRIPTION	ONE-TIME DONATION
Choose monthly amount... $10 : $10.00 USD - monthly$20 : $20.00 USD - monthly$50 : $50.00 USD - monthly$100 : $100.00 USD - monthly	(Snail mail support to "Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028" always welcome too!)

It was Day 7 of public hearings for the bipartisan U.S. House Select Committee probe of Donald Trump's January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and his multiple failed attempts to steal the 2020 Presidential Election. We've got full Special Coverage once again on today's BradCast. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

If you've been turning away over the past week or so, we've got a quick recap of "our story so far" at the top of today's show, summing up the key elements of the six previous public hearings by the Committee. In short, to sum up that summary, Donald Trump knew everything and was personally involved in everything. He knew there was no fraud of note in the 2020 election, as all of his top advisers and legal experts told him as much, but he continued to lie about it anyway. He knew that his efforts to reverse election results to steal the election from Joe Biden in various swing-states and at the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021 were unlawful and/or Constitutional. Again, we've been shown that all his top advisers told him as much. He relentlessly pushed for it anyway. And he knew that calling his supporters to D.C. on January 6 and directing them to march on the Capitol would result in violence led by armed extremist groups. He was advised against it, but he did it anyway.

Today's hearing picked up on Trump's "call to arms" to his supporters. It came in the middle of the night in his now-infamous "Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!" tweet, issued just hours after an insane, "unhinged", hours-long December 18, 2020 White House meeting with his personal crackpot attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, his felonious former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne (for some reason) and a bunch of White House attorneys. The latter angrily tried to derail the MAGA coup plotters plans to have the President issue an Executive Order to seize the nation's voting machines and install Powell as a Special Counsel to investigate fraud and issue arrests. Even Trump loyalist and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone --- who finally testified to the Committee last Friday --- said he "vehemently opposed" the "terrible idea." That, after repeatedly asking for any evidence of fraud and being shown none at all.

That bonkers meeting, and its fallout --- resulting in the tweet that "electrified and galvanized" his supporters immediately thereafter --- was detailed in the first part of today's hearing, with mountains of evidence and video-taped testimony. The second part covered what happened next, as the extremist groups which supported Trump, including the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers (the leaders of which have already been indicted for seditious conspiracy), descended on D.C., planning for the violence --- and much worse --- that eventually occurred.

The Committee shared video of Trump's media supporters, immediately after his "will be wild!" tweet, calling on their own followers to join them in D.C., including rightwing conspiracy radio host Alex Jones and others. One called for "storming right into the Capitol," noting "the rules of engagement: If you have enough people, you can push down any fence or wall." Another vowed "There are gonna be a million, geeked-up armed Americans" coming to occupy D.C. in response to Trump's call.

All of that, weeks before Trump eventually directed them to march to the Capitol on Jan. 6 in what, the Committee showed through several draft tweets and speeches, was absolutely not a spontaneous ad-lib made by Trump during his remarks on the Ellipse. The armed march on the Capitol was the plan all along.

On the night before the attack, according to White House call logs obtained and revealed by the Committee today, Trump's disgraced former aide Steve Bannon took to his "War Room" podcast just after a conversation with the then President to declare: "All hell is going to break lose tomorrow. It's all converging and now we're on the point of attack. It's not gonna happen how you think it's going to happen. It's gonna be quite extraordinarily different and all I can say is strap in."

One witness at the end of today's hearing were Jason Van Tatenhove, an independent journalist turned self-described Oath Keepers propagandist, who says he left the group 5 years ago after seeing them become more and more racist and violent. The other was Stephen Ayers, a January 6 rioter and Trump believer. He was not tied to any of the extremist groups. He was just a guy, "a family man" who answered Trump's call to come to D.C. and "fight like hell" to "save the country" as he believed Trump needed him to do. He was arrested and pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct at the Capitol and now regrets every part of it, believes it was all a con, but has since lost his job and much more after having fallen for Trump's Big --- violent, deadly --- Lie.

Today's hearing came to a close with another Liz Cheney cliff-hanger. This time she revealed that Trump had attempted to contact one of the Committee's witnesses following their last hearing. "We will take any effort to influence witness testimony very seriously," vowed the Committee's Republican Vice Chair, adding that the Justice Department had been notified about the apparent witness tampering by the disgraced former President.

Joining us to make sense of all of this today are, once again, HEATHER DIGBY PARTON of Salon and Hullaballoo, joined this time by DAVID FARIS, Associate Professor of Political Science at Roosevelt University and a contributor to both Newsweek and The Week.

"They've been setting up the various strands," Parton explains, describing today's hearing focused on Trump's directives to his violent supporters, as she cited Andrew Weissman's recent "'hub and spoke' conspiracy" op-ed at NYTimes. "There were a number of different spokes going out from the Oval Office, which included the 'voter fraud,' the fake electors, the DOJ, Mike Pence. This was one of the spokes, and it's a huge one, because it is the spoke that leads from the White House and the Oval Office to the insurrection on January 6th. That part of the whole coup plot, the conspiracy to keep Trump in office come what may, that was a huge one."

"Big picture, I think these hearings have a number of different purposes. One is to provide concrete evidence of a systematic and sustained effort to extra-constitutionally overturn the results of the 2020 election," Faris observes. "Stealing the election. That's a coup. We've learned a lot more during these hearings about the mechanics of the coup. The bottom line is that the people who were putting these plans into motion knew perfectly well that they were illegal."

He also notes that he believes these hearings are likely to spur the DoJ into action. "There are a lot of little Trump lieutenants running for office who are planning to do things like manipulate the vote in 2024, or use extra-constitutional procedures to install a Republican candidate for President into office," Faris tells us. "There are a lot of people who are contemplating committing crimes in another conspiracy against the United States, and if you do not show them there are consequences to the people who did it the first time, I don't see how those people can draw any other conclusion then that they'll get away with it. I wish that we were not in this position where we have to talk about indicting a former President. It's not great. But I don't think he can be allowed to skate without really jeopardizing our democracy."

Lots more on today's show, of course, from the hearing itself and via smart analysis from Parton and Faris as, yes, the walls continue to close in on Donald J. Trump...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

MONTHLY BRAD BLOG SUBSCRIPTION	ONE-TIME DONATION
Choose monthly amount... $10 : $10.00 USD - monthly$20 : $20.00 USD - monthly$50 : $50.00 USD - monthly$100 : $100.00 USD - monthly	(Snail mail support to "Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028" always welcome too!)

Please pardon the whiplash on today's BradCast, from our special coverage of the blockbuster J6 hearing in the U.S. House yesterday to coverage of election results in eight states today, and what they both may mean for November. But that's our world right now. [Audio link to full show is posted after this summary below.]

Critical midterm primary elections (and runoffs), and one Special Election for the U.S. House were held on Tuesday in Illinois, Colorado, Oklahoma, Utah, New York, Mississippi, South Carolina and Nebraska.

We've learned of a few reported problems for voters at the poll yesterday in several of those states (IL, MS, UT, NY) which we cover first today. Thankfully, they were fairly limited --- at least so far --- and not terribly egregious.

Then it's on to our curated and wholly incomplete coverage of noteworthy races in a number of those states, some of which may be quite telling regarding November and the so-called "Conventional Wisdom" that Democrats are due for a drubbing. That's what history tells us, of course, about the party in power for midterm elections during the first term of an unpopular President. But, given these exceedingly unconventional times, it'd be a sucker's bet and political malpractice --- for Democrats and democracy itself --- to simply presume history will repeat itself this fall.

Among the many results of note covered today: losses for 2020 election deniers and alleged criminals (like Tina Peters, the indicted County Clerk in Mesa County who lost her GOP primary for Sec. of State bigly, even in her own home county) in CO; losses for corrupt climate change deniers and disgraced former Trump officials (like his scandal-plagued EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt who came in fifth in a GOP primary for the U.S. Senate) in OK; both wins and losses for loyalist Trumpers and anti-choice zealots in IL and CO (with Dems hoping they'd win their GOP nominations, because they'd be easier to defeat in November); a crushing, if satisfying loss for Rudy Giuliani's son in NY; victories and losses for progressive candidates in several states; And, perhaps most notably today, some telling results from the one D vs. R race on Tuesday, a U.S. House Special Election in NE.

As expected, the Democrat lost that special U.S. House race in NE in an exceedingly Republican district in which the GOP candidate won by 22 points in 2020. But on Tuesday, the Republican won by just over 5 points. More interestingly, in the one Democratic-leaning County in the District held by Republicans since 1964, support for the Democrat spiked from +1 in 2020 to +13 on Tuesday, in the first head-to-head election between the two parties since 'Roe v. Wade' was struck down by the radical rightwing U.S. Supreme Court on Friday. Hopefully, Democrats have taken notice.

There are many mitigating factors that could result in this year's midterms defying history and expert predictions. That doesn't mean they will, but they certainly could, particularly if Democrats figure out how to appropriately activate both their base and those who are furious about SCOTUS stripping away a Constitutionally-protected individual right for the first time in our nation's history.

Initial polling in the wake of Roe's demise find the SCOTUS opinion to be exceedingly unpopular with Democrats, of course, but also with independent voters and even a fairly large chunk of Republicans. We take a look at some of those very interesting tea leaves on today's program and what they could mean for November.

Finally, we close with Desi Doyen and our latest Green News Report, in advance of what is probably very bad news indeed for both the climate and the EPA coming from our corrupt Supreme Court tomorrow! But, for today, we've got news about what sparked New Mexico's largest-ever wildfire; Japan's electric grid facing stress under historic record heat; a new leftist climate hawk President for Colombia; and much more....

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

MONTHLY BRAD BLOG SUBSCRIPTION	ONE-TIME DONATION
Choose monthly amount... $10 : $10.00 USD - monthly$20 : $20.00 USD - monthly$50 : $50.00 USD - monthly$100 : $100.00 USD - monthly	(Snail mail support to "Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028" always welcome too!)

Yes, we heard him correctly! Rep. Bennie Thompson, Chair of the bipartisan U.S. House Select Committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, opened today's 5th day of public hearings by noting that Donald Trump tried to "steal" the 2020 election! Finally, as noted on today's BradCast Special Coverage, we're getting somewhere! Let's see if the rest of the media is still as allergic to using the correct word for the crime that Trump and his supporters hoped to pull off! [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

Before we get to our Special Coverage today, we've got a few too-brief words on today's unelected, rogue, corrupt, stolen and packed 6 to 3 Republican US Supreme Court majority undermining states' rights to "well-regulate" the carrying of firearms in public in their own states, and undercutting Miranda rights for those detained by law enforcement.

Then, it's on to another harrowing day of the House J6 Committee's gripping hearings, detailing Trump's unrelenting and virtually psychotic attempts to steal the 2020 Presidential election from the American people. Today's hearing focused on his failed attempt to decapitate the remaining leadership at the U.S. Department of Justice after his own Attorney General Bill Barr resigned in response to the loser Trump's repeated and knowingly false claims that Joe Biden only defeated him thanks to massive, if apparently evidence-free, fraud.

The DoJ scheme involved replacing Trump's Acting Attorney General with a low-level apparatchik named Jeffrey Clark who agreed to do Trump's bidding. The plot came within a hair's breadth of overthrowing the entire American government. It was only the promise of hundreds of top DoJ officials resigning en masse that ultimately forced Trump to relent.

Three of those top officials, former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, his acting Deputy AG Richard Donoghue, and former Asst. AG in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), Steve Engel, testified live on Thursday under questioning by Illinois' Republican Rep. Adam Kinziger, who detailed just "how close we came to losing it all."

The panel laid out in detail how the DoJ (as well as DHS and DoD) were relentlessly directed by Trump, over and again, to investigate every absurd, easily-debunked conspiracy theory dredged up by rightwing MAGA Internet clowns. From false claims about Dominion voting systems to false claims about truckloads of shredded ballots to false claims about Italian military satellites and Chinese-made smart thermostats flipping votes from Trump to Biden.

Nevertheless, Trump's apparatchik Clark was willing to do Trump's bidding. He drafted a letter to send to swing-state legislatures falsely instructing them that the Department had found massive fraud that would change the results of the elections, directing their state legislatures to reconvene to choose electors for Trump instead of Biden. Rosen and Donoghue, to their credit, testified that they refused to sign the bogus letter, and then detailed how Trump schemed to fire Rosen and replace him with Clark, who had never even tried a criminal case, as the DoJ's chief. It all culminated in the infamous, hours-long, January 3rd, 2021, Celebrity Apprentice-style Oval Office showdown where both Rosen and Clark made their cases. Rosen's was backed up by the entire leadership at DoJ (as well as White House Counsel), who vowed to leave if Trump pulled the trigger and fired Rosen. That would have resulted in an unprecedented Constitutional crisis just days before the joint session of Congress to confirm Biden's victory.

And, after all of that, Kinzinger noted at the end of today's hearing, Trump still went out to his rally on the Ellipse on January 6th and repeated all of the long-ago debunked claims of fraud, inciting the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Today's hearing began just moments after CNN reported that Clark's home had been raided by the FBI before dawn on Wednesday. So, it would seem, the current Dept. of Justice is actually on the case.

We're delighted to be joined today by two fantastic guests, one of whom is a former DoJ Attorney with a great deal of insight into DoJ procedures and the harrowing testimony offered today. LISA GRAVES, who is now Executive Director of the research firm True North Research, served as Deputy Asst. Attorney General at the U.S. Justice Dept during the Clinton Administration and into the peaceful transition to George W Bush's Administration. She then became Chief Counsel for nominations in the U.S. Senate and a Deputy Chief for the US Court system. HEATHER DIGBY PARTON, our anchor guest during all of the hearings to date, is the beloved proprietor of her long-running Hullabaloo blog and an award-winning contributor at Salon.

Graves is a font of insight regarding the way the DoJ is supposed to work and just how wildly dysfunctional, inappropriate --- and most likely criminal --- the actions of both Trump and Clark were during the disgraced former President's final days attempting to cling to power.

Clark, she argues, "is a man who was willing to bend any law in order to serve the political agenda of this President, and is exactly the type of person who should never be entrusted with any position of power or public trust. He clearly is someone who is more than willing to set aside facts and law. What we see is this man at the center of a criminal conspiracy, in my view, and the [former] President is at the helm of that conspiracy."

As Parton notes today, the "the Constitutional crisis that everyone was hinting at [was] in retrospect, a very close thing," as Trump was trying to "overthrow the government" just three weeks before the inauguration. But Trump's ultimate, begrudging decision to not fire Rosen and replace him with Clark means that "Trump was not irrational. He did know what he was doing." And that, she observes, is "a new and interesting data point" to come out of today's hearings.

Also coming out of today's hearings, a list of six Republican members of Congress who apparently recognized that their involvement in this criminal conspiracy could land them in prison. So much so that they unsuccessfully sought pardons from Trump before he left office. Among those named by former White House officials as seeking pardons: Reps. Mo Brooks (AL), Matt Gaetz (FL), Scott Perry (PA), Louie Gohmert (TX), Andy Biggs (AZ) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA).

We've got much more smart insight and analysis in today's Special Coverage. Please tune in!...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

MONTHLY BRAD BLOG SUBSCRIPTION	ONE-TIME DONATION
Choose monthly amount... $10 : $10.00 USD - monthly$20 : $20.00 USD - monthly$50 : $50.00 USD - monthly$100 : $100.00 USD - monthly	(Snail mail support to "Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028" always welcome too!)

He didn't help steal the 2020 Presidential election for Donald Trump, but that doesn't make Georgia's Republican Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger a hero. As discussed on today's BradCast, he did the right thing, sort of, but, as our guest explains today, but for the wrong reasons. Worse, he now appears to be involved in an outright cover-up of wrong-doing by Trump supporters and GOP election officials in the Peach State.

First up today, on the heels of the gripping series of hearings by the bipartisan U.S. House Select Committee investigating Trump's January 6, 2021 insurrection and his multiple attempts to steal the 2020 election, the Dept. of Justice is reportedly broadening their ongoing criminal investigation. Washington Post reports tonight on new subpoenas dropped in a number of states on Wednesday to several of the fake Trump electors who tried to join the disgraced former President in his efforts to rob the American people.

Meanwhile, Tuesday's hearing, as discussed during yesterday's special coverage, was gripping and emotional at times, as it focused on state officials and local election workers who refused to go along with Trump's election theft schemes and were targeted and terrorized in the bargain by the former President and his mob of MAGA thugs.

While there were a number of folks who testified on Tuesday that reacted heroically in the moment, two of them, Raffensperger and his Deputy Sec. of State Gabe Sterling (who served as Georgia's Voting Systems Manager in 2020), should not necessarily be included among them.

The three separate tallies of Presidential election results in the state that both men testified about on Tuesday --- the original machine count, a second statewide hand-count "audit", and a third tally by machine, as requested by the Trump Campaign --- are not quite as pristine as they would have the nation believe. Moreover, Raffensperger's office appears to be carrying out a months long cover-up of a serious breach of the state's voting system by Trump supporters and GOP election officials in GA's rural, right-leaning Coffee County.

As promised on yesterday, we're joined today by MARILYN MARKS of the non-partisan, nonprofit Coalition for Good Governance for a bit of a rebuttal to Raffensperger and Sterling's testimony before the House J6 panel, and an update to a stunning and troubling story of corruption we initially reported here last month, which could have very serious ramifications for elections in both 2022 and 2024.

Marks, who's Coalition has two long-running federal lawsuits against Georgia and Raffensperger --- one, filed in 2017 to block the use of his 100% unverifiable touchscreen voting systems made by Dominion, and the other challenging the state's SB 202 voter suppression bill (I am a named plaintiff, representing media) --- has been analyzing the state's 2020 election results with a fine-toothed comb as part of her group's voting machine case. She explains today that the numbers reported by Raffensperger's hand-counted "audit" and machine-tallied recount, are nowhere near as aligned with the original tally --- and each other --- as Raffensperger and Sterling represented to the Congressional panel.

In fact, hand-counted numbers were tallied in secret and "fudged" by the state to match the original tally from Raffensperger's hand-chosen touchscreen voting systems, she charges.

That still doesn't mean that Trump won the state, as he pretends that he did. The mountain of errors discovered in the tallies, she takes pains to note, went randomly both ways. But they did not match up as perfectly with the original count as the two state officials claimed on Tuesday.

"We have found nothing that would suggest that Biden should not have been declared the winner. However, there are massive problems with the audit, the recount, and probably the original count, as well," Marks describes. "What really happened here, it appears, is that the audit, as well as the machine recount, were fudged, if you will. That may be a strong word for me to be using right now, but I will just say that the numbers are not straightforward at all, that there are many adjustments that they needed to make to try to arrive at claiming that the numbers matched the original count. They do not."

Why didn't the numbers match up? "It's hard to know," she tells me. When he was asked about it during his deposition in CGG's federal lawsuit, Sterling "just shrugged it all off as 'human error.' He did not try to tell us the same thing he tried to tell the Congress yesterday. He did not try to say it's only off by a little bit. We took him through the numbers and he said, 'It's all human error.'" He was certain that the machine results must have been correct and any count that differed "had to be human error. How many years have we heard, across the nation, about how the machines have to be right?"

While Raffensperger's hand-count audit was ostensibly carried out in public view, the public couldn't actually oversee it or follow along. All of the numbers throughout the process were kept secret and sent back to the SoS' office. By contrast with, say, the fully transparent statewide recount of the 2008 Al Franken/Norm Coleman U.S. Senate race in Minnesota, when the public and media were allowed to follow along and track every step and the tally of every ballot, there is no way to know if Georgia's 2020 numbers were right or wrong. Shamefully, as Marks observes, the media didn't raise a peep about it.

She offers much more on that during today's program before we turn to the related topic of the disturbing matter in Coffee County. There, as we reported last month --- along with exceptional investigative coverage from Washington Post and Daily Beast (but not, curiously enough, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, which hasn't covered it at all) --- Trump supporters, in cahoots with Republicans on the Coffee County Board of Elections, made illicit and illegal copies of the sensitive Dominion voting system software used across the entire state the day after the January 6 insurrection.

You may have heard of similar breaches by Trumpers that occurred in Michigan and Colorado (where the Republican County Clerk in Mesa County, Tina Peters, is now facing criminal charges for having done so.) The breach in GA occurred in January, as one of the apparent ring leaders actually confessed to Marks during a phone call, which she was smart enough to record. (We play part of that phone call confession on today's show.)

Though none of this was publicly known, Raffensperger's office, several months after the breach, seized and exchanged the voting server in Coffee, claiming that someone had changed the password so that the system could no longer be accessed. But it wasn't until late last year, when Sterling was asked about all of this during his deposition in Marks' lawsuit that any of it was confirmed. He claimed, at the time, that the matter was being investigated by his office. But, as Marks details today (and in a recent post at Medium), there is absolutely no record of any investigation over the past year and a half by Raffensperger's office. In fact, as Marks suggests today, it appears the Sec. of State is involved in a straight up cover-up of the entire matter.

"This is awfully hard to put together," she concedes when I ask why the SoS, who helped block Trump's efforts to steal the election, would now work to protect those very same people. "It doesn't make much sense at all. So why would Raffensperger do that? Again, we go back to he needs to defend the system more than he wants to defend democracy." He's also running for re-election this November.

Making things worse, as she points out, serious vulnerabilities were discovered and documented in Georgia's Dominion touchscreen systems (which her suit hopes to ban) by one of her lawsuit's expert witnesses. The vulnerabilities were then reviewed and confirmed by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Administration (CISA), which issued a warning to states about it late last month.

But the SoS office has responded in the lawsuit to say that those vulnerabilities are not of concern, since someone would have to spend a lot of times with the system software to know how to exploit them. Well...guess what happened over a year and a half ago in Coffee County?

Raffensperger's "defense is not that the system doesn't have any vulnerabilities," Marks notes. "His defense is, 'Look, you can't get to those vulnerabilities because the software is entrusted in insider election officials' hands.' Not anymore."

It's a big show today, concluding with our latest Green News Report. Please tune in for the full, stunning story...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

MONTHLY BRAD BLOG SUBSCRIPTION	ONE-TIME DONATION
Choose monthly amount... $10 : $10.00 USD - monthly$20 : $20.00 USD - monthly$50 : $50.00 USD - monthly$100 : $100.00 USD - monthly	(Snail mail support to "Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028" always welcome too!)

On today's BradCast: Special Coverage of gripping Day 4 public testimony in the bipartisan U.S. House Select Committee's investigation of the January 6th insurrection and Donald Trump's repeatedly failed attempts to steal the 2020 election from the American people. [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) led the bulk of the questioning of witnesses on Tuesday, observing at one point that "the system held, but barely", thanks to "people of courage, Republicans and Democrats, who put their oath to the country and Constitution above any other consideration."

We may take some issue with part of that on tomorrow's BradCast, with a guest who may rebut at least some of the testimony offered by the two Republican state officials from Georgia who testified on Tuesday, Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger and Deputy Sec. of State (who served as the voting system manager in 2020) Gabriel Sterling. But there should be no question of the selflessness of the two other live witnesses, Arizona's Republican state House Speaker Rusty Bowers and now-former Fulton County, GA election worker Wandrea "Shaye" Moss.

All four of them endured unrelenting and unforgivable attacks and threats and lies from Trump --- and from his attorney Rudy Giuliani and their mobs of thuggish supporters --- in his criminal attempts to fraudulently flip the results of the 2020 election in both of the swing-states focused on today. In the case of Moss in Atlanta, as one of our guests suggests today, she and her mother, Ruby Freeman (and eventually even her grandmother), were targets of nothing less than "a form of terrorism" by the President of the United States. All for the crime, as Moss explained, of "doing my job." It was a job that she loved. For ten years. Because she was able to help people vote. Now, as she testified this afternoon, she's barely able to leave the house, is constantly forced to look over her shoulder more than a year and a half since the election, is afraid to go out with her mother (for fear she might mention her name out loud), has gained 60 pounds, and has left her job for Fulton County that she loved so much. The terror visited on her and her mother was too much to bear.

Moss and Freeman were the targets of the oft-repeated Trump/Giuliani lie that they had hidden ballots in a "suitcase" under a table at the State Farm Arena counting room in Atlanta on Election Night, before "physically" forcing observers and the media to leave the room, and then counting those fraudulent ballots ("all for Joe Biden," as Trump lied) multiple times. All of those claims were easily rebutted lies. All of them. As Raffensperger and Sterling (who both voted for Trump) and even Trump's own advisors told him repeatedly. Trump knew they were lies, even before he continued to repeat them over and over, mentioning Ruby Freeman's name 18 times during his infamous recorded phone call with Raffensperger, threatening him with potential criminal penalties if he didn't "find" 11,780 votes --- one more than Trump needed --- to steal the election from Biden in the Peach State.

Bowers, also a Trump voter in Arizona, faced similar lies --- about hundreds of thousands of votes cast by undocumented immigrants and thousands of dead voters --- as he refused Trump's entreaties to convene a special session of the state legislature in order to select Electors for the disgraced President instead of the ones for Biden that the state's voters actually voted for. Bowers, elected to the state legislature in 1993, refused to violate the law and his sacred oath to both the state and U.S. constitutions.

It was an emotional --- and, at times, harrowing --- day in the hearing room, as the House panel laid out the pathetic story of the loser Trump's relentless attempts to force local officials to do his unlawful bidding, to trick several swing-state Republicans into signing up as fraudulent Electors, and as he threatened those who wouldn't play ball with the violence of his mobs.

We're joined today for our special coverage with smart analysis of the entire hearing by old-school progressive bloggers HEATHER DIGBY PARTON of Salon and Hullabaloo and "DRIFTGLASS" of the Professional Left Podcast.

"What we're seeing over and over again [is that] Donald Trump was deeply, deeply immersed in this. He was calling these legislators and basically trying to order them to overturn the election on his behalf," Parton observers. "But there is also this undercurrent here that we're seeing through all of this, that this was always leading to violence. The violence was building from the time of the election. What [the Committee] did today, in particular, was talking about the threats of violence to all of these people. [Trump and his supporters] were inciting a form of terrorism against these people."

As Driftglass characterizes the case being laid bare by the Committee to date: "Donald Trump was the ringleader of this. He's the 'don'. He's the man calling the shots, dispatching his men into the field to threaten everybody. This is an army of raptors testing the fence --- 'Where can we find a break?' --- with the intention in mind at all times to retain power by any means necessary. And it was very clear that behind this was a mob of Brownshirts. He made it clear how deeply he was enjoying the idea scaring the crap out of people and ruining their lives for daring to stand in his way of holding onto power."

"Today was heartbreaking," he argues. "How could you be a citizen, love democracy, and watch these two very different people --- this old, bald, white guy, and these lovely African-American mother and daughter --- who go to very different churches, I'm sure, but have the same reverence for the Constitution and fidelity to duty, and believe this is a holy, sacred thing they're doing, and how completely they were undercut by that."

There is, of course, much much more in our coverage today. I hope you'll tune in...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

MONTHLY BRAD BLOG SUBSCRIPTION	ONE-TIME DONATION
Choose monthly amount... $10 : $10.00 USD - monthly$20 : $20.00 USD - monthly$50 : $50.00 USD - monthly$100 : $100.00 USD - monthly	(Snail mail support to "Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028" always welcome too!)

Today on The BradCast we try to reach out to so many of those Republicans and Trump dead-enders that we hear from usually only after the show. That, before Tuesday primaries and runoffs in in Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia and Washington D.C., and amid the short pause before hearings in the House J6 Committee return (tomorrow), and as the number of those who believe Trump should be charged with a crime for his attempt to steal the 2020 election continues to grow.

If we are going to save American democracy from the minority autocratic rule now sought by the bulk of the Republican Party, we need to try, at least, to speak to each other again. Even to those who have been so thoroughly groomed, for so many years --- by Fox "News", by rightwing talk radio, by elected Republican officials --- to actually believe the GOP lies that have convinced those Americans to vote against their own best interests in election after election. We must reach out, somehow, to those that still buy into Donald Trump's evidence-free claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him (as he, himself, had tried to steal it) or who were duped into sending part of the quarter of a billion bucks to his "Official Election Defense Fund" even though, as we recently learned thanks to the bipartisan J6 Committee, doesn't even exist.

So, today, in hopes of at least trying to reach some of those voters, we thought we'd share the thoughts of some longtime conservative Republican voices. Among them, the very conservative former federal appeals court judge, J. Michael Luttig who, for years, had been compared to Justices Scalia and Thomas, who 33 of Luttig's former clerks would eventually clerk for. Last week, Luttig testified to the House Select Committee, warning that Donald Trump and the Republican party remain a "clear and present danger" to American democracy, not only because of the January 6th insurrection or due to Trump's attempt to, as Luttig wrote [PDF], "steal the 2020 presidential election from the American people," but because "the former President, his allies and supporters pledged that they would attempt to overthrow that 2024 election, but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020." He is now calling on Republican leaders to step up to end their "war on democracy."

Also, we share a critical, must-listen commentary from former young Republican James Killen (pictured above) hoping to reach current young Republicans to keep them from making the same mistakes he did by letting them know how they've been lied to by the GOP about...well, pretty much everything, from top to bottom over the past 40 years.

Then, after an invitation to the many rightwingers who do listen to The BradCast --- which we know, because they so frequently contact me right after the show via Email or Twitter --- we open the phone lines to at least one long time Republican who is still buying in to the lies....apparently all of them, as we discuss. If we don't at least try to have these conversations, we will never end this new American uncivil war.

And where will it go from here if we don't? Well, a new campaign ad from the disgraced former Missouri Governor turned GOP primary candidate for U.S. Senate, Eric Greitens --- in which he wields a firearm and calls on fellow Republicans to go "RINO (Republican in Name Only) hunting" --- should give you a pretty good, and chilling, idea...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

MONTHLY BRAD BLOG SUBSCRIPTION	ONE-TIME DONATION
Choose monthly amount... $10 : $10.00 USD - monthly$20 : $20.00 USD - monthly$50 : $50.00 USD - monthly$100 : $100.00 USD - monthly	(Snail mail support to "Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028" always welcome too!)

With the bipartisan January 6 Committee having postponed today's hearing, we take the opportunity on today's BradCast to spend some time rebutting the disgraced former President's supposed rebuttal to the two damning hearings held to date. But, of course, we've got much more as well, including election results from Tuesday and evidence of both voting system problems and bad faith elected MAGA officials already trying to disenfranchise 2022 voters. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

Among the stories covered on today's program...

• An error caused by paper jams during ballot scanning on Election Day at the precincts on the state's computer tabulators in Iowa during their June 7 primaries has reportedly resulted in a whole bunch of recounts across the state. Cedar Rapid's KCRG cites an email from the Sec. of State's office which has lead to those recounts, in hopes of reconciling the number of ballots misreported by the scanners as cast with the number of voters who actually signed in to vote.

• Noteworthy election results from four states which held primaries on Tuesday (Maine, Nevada, North Dakota and South Carolina) and one (Texas) which purposely held a low-turnout U.S. Special Election yesterday, instead of at the same time as their regular primaries in March or primary runoffs in May. While we cover a lot of Tuesday's races, and why they matter (or don't), the most disturbing one is likely the Secretary of State's race in Nevada, where a 2020 election denialist by the name of Jim Marchant has apparently won a 38% plurality to become the GOP's nominee to become the critical swing-state's chief election official in advance of the 2024 election.

• The dangers of an election denier like Marchant, who served as one of the state GOP's fake electors in 2020, and who has said he wouldn't have certified Joe Biden's victory over Donald Trump that year had he been SoS at the time, is a stark warning of what lies ahead. But we're already seeing the dangers of brain-poisoned MAGA Mobsters in positions of elected authority. The three-person County Commission in a very right-leaning rural county in New Mexico, is refusing to certify results from their June 7 primary. Even though votes are cast on hand-marked paper ballots across the state, the County Commission unanimously voted against certification of primary results, citing distrust of the County's digital ballot scanners made by Dominion Voting. They have no evidence of fraud, which might otherwise allow a court to order the hand-count they are seeking. They just don't trust the results in the County where Trump won 62% of the vote in 2020. The Republican County Clerk is furious and the Democratic Sec. of State is now suing the County Commission ahead of this Friday's deadline for County certification. Expect much more of this in the months and years ahead. We've long warned about exactly this type of fallout from our irresponsible rush to the use secret vote casting and counting systems made by private vendors and the avenues it opens for opportunists to claim fraud without any evidence of same.

• On Monday night, after the bipartisan U.S. House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol and other efforts by Trump to steal the 2020 election, our corrupt former President issued a 12-page rebuttal [PDF] to the Committee's first two hearings. We rebut his dumb rebuttal today. It leans heavily on tired, long-ago debunked nonsense, such as his lead in some swing-states on Election Night "inexplicably" disappearing (after heavily-Republican polling place ballots were quickly tallied before the arduous task of opening and verifying and counting heavily-Democratic vote-by-mail ballots one-by-one) and how thousands attended his rallies, while Biden chose not to hold super-spreader events during the worst pandemic in 100 years. Much of Trump's (ghost-writer's) claims were already debunked during the Committee hearings to date, which he seems to presume that his supporters didn't watch or are too dumb to understand.

  Trump's ghost-writer spends most of the rebuttal ink citing what is laughably described as "indisputable proof" of "Ballot Trafficking" presented in the repeatedly debunked 2000 Mules movie. That's a pretend documentary film created by a long-discredited GOP "election integrity" group named True the Vote and a rightwing activist named Dinesh D'Souza who actually pleaded guilty himself to several federal election fraud crimes before he was later pardoned by Trump.

  As noted, the film has been repeatedly debunked, including by us, several times by now. Months before it was even released, the Georgia Bureau of Investigations (GBI) and FBI concluded the group's claims about cell phone data purporting to reveal evidence of "ballot harvesting" by "mules" of tens or hundreds of thousands of fraudulent ballots cast in drop-boxes, in fact, reveals no crimes at all. A GA state Board of Elections investigation after the movie's release found that supposed "ballot mules" in Atlanta, shown via security camera footage in the film, were just regular voters legally casting their own ballot and those of direct family members. None of the "mules" are ever seen in the film visiting a drop-box or multiple boxes more than once.

  But, perhaps the most stinging rebuttal came from Trump's own Attorney General, Bill Barr this week. During sworn testimony to the J6 Committee, shared by the panel on Monday, Barr laughed out loud at even the mention of the name of the film, before going on to explain how he found it to be "singularly unimpressive," "indefensible," and that it failed to "establish widespread illegal harvesting." That, of course, is a long way from the "indisputable proof" Trump's dumb rebuttal claimed it to be.

• Finally, speaking of the House J6 Committee, Republican Vice Chair Liz Cheney released a video teaser on Tuesday for its next upcoming hearing scheduled for Thursday. This one will focus on the pressure Trump placed on Vice President Mike Pence to help him steal the 2020 election by tossing out valid Electoral College votes on January 6, 2021. Cheney's teaser video includes testimony from one of Trump's top White House attorneys who says he warned outside lawyer John Eastman, who developed the scheme for Pence to toss out the votes, to "get a great f'ing criminal defense lawyer," adding "you're gonna need it."

Special Coverage of tomorrow's J6 Hearing, of course, on tomorrow's BradCast!...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

MONTHLY BRAD BLOG SUBSCRIPTION	ONE-TIME DONATION
Choose monthly amount... $10 : $10.00 USD - monthly$20 : $20.00 USD - monthly$50 : $50.00 USD - monthly$100 : $100.00 USD - monthly	(Snail mail support to "Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028" always welcome too!)

On Day 2 of public hearings in the U.S. House, Donald Trump's greatest con continues to unravel. On today's BradCast, we get you all caught up on today's public hearings by the bipartisan U.S. House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol and the attempt by the former President to steal the 2020 election by defrauding the nation. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

The witnesses who testified live today, as our guest HEATHER DIGBY PARTON of Salon and Hullabaloo pointed out, were all Republicans. And they all made clear that Trump not only lost the 2020 election, but he lied over and again about fraud, even though he was told...over and again, by his closest campaign advisers, top government officials and even his own family, that he lost fair and square. He knew his claims were, as his own Attorney General Bill Barr described it, "bullshit". Nonetheless, he kept barraging his supporters via email for more and more money for his "Official Election Defense Fund". But, as the Committee's Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) pointed out: There was no "Official Election Defense Fund" and the $250 million in small dollar donations Trump raked in all went to him, not to legal challenges of the 2020 election.

Once again, a mix of live and videotaped witness testimony put the lie to Trump's Big Lie fraud claims and the false notion that he believed them to be true. He didn't. He knew better. He just didn't care. Live witnesses today who underscored those points: Chris Stirewalt, the former Fox "News" political director who made the correct Election Night call that Trump had lost Arizona; BJay Pak, Trump's own U.S. Attorney in Georgia who investigated all of the many claims by Trump supporters of fraud in Atlanta, finding none of them to be true. He was forced to resign thereafter; Trump's own 2020 Campaign Manager, Bill Stepien, was scheduled to testify, but his wife suddenly went into labor on Monday morning, so the Committee relied on his video taped testimony in which he explained that he repeatedly told Trump that his claims of fraud were bogus; Philadelphia's Republican City Commissioner Al Schmidt who debunked Rudy Giuliani's false testimony to the PA legislature that more than 8,000 "dead people" voted in the state in 2020. "Not only was there not evidence of 8,000 dead voters voting in Pennsylvania," Schmidt testified, "there wasn't evidence of 8."

The most damning testimony may have come from Trump's former Attorney General Bill Barr, who said on tape that he and the DoJ tracked down every claim made by Trump and his supporters and found none of them to be true. "Boy, if he really believes this stuff," Barr testified thinking, "he's become detached from reality." No matter how "crazy" he told Trump the allegations were, it made no difference. Barr debunked the notion that the Dominion Voting systems company stole the election for Joe Biden, and even went on to dismantle the easily-debunked 2000 Mules movie which pretends to document tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots cast unlawfully by thousands of people in swing-states. Barr's debunking of that film, which he laughs out loud about, was suspiciously similar to our own debunking on this program several weeks ago.

Even longtime, top GOP election attorney Ben Ginsberg --- who successfully lead the RNC's fight to convince the U.S. Supreme Court to steal the 2000 election for George W. Bush --- testified live on Monday that there was "no credible evidence of fraud produced by the Trump campaign or his supporters." He also made clear that dozens of lawsuits rejected by the courts (including by many Trump-appointed judges) did, in fact, examine the merits of the challenges and found no basis for them.

"I think what is important, and I was really glad to see, that they decided to take one of these hearings and really attack the Big Lie itself," Parton tells us today. "Because I don't think you can really prove the case about Trump's coup plot without attacking that as well. They went from the very beginning. Trump was undermining the election 18 months before the election took place."

Parton also praised the panel's highlighting of Trump's "'willful blindness,' in which he is shown to have been told by everyone that the election was not stolen. We're talking about his own campaign team, people in his family, the Dept. of Justice, various officials around the country. They all said the same thing. Ginsberg pointed out the courts also said the same thing. [Trump] refused to see it, and in fact continuously got more and more angry, apparently, continually ignored what they said, and went toward the people who told him what he wanted to hear."

"That's actually a legal concept, where someone does have an obligation --- they have a responsibility to at least have some recognition of the facts of a case. You're not allowed to go into a court and say, 'I didn't know,' when you've had dozens of people telling you something. So that's leads to maybe a potential criminal referral."

She also explained how she was "shocked" by the Big Lie fund-raising scam. "We all sort of knew this but it hadn't really been a focus until now," she observed. "But I think this is super-important, because this could go toward a real fraud investigation, a real case of wire fraud, where they defrauded millions of devoted followers with a Big Lie. And, in fact, a lot of the people who were involved in that fundraising, they also knew it was a Big Lie because they just testified to it. This is kind of a big deal."

Finally today, we open the phones to see how listeners are responding to what the House panel has been unpacking over the first two hearings, with at least another four still to come...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

MONTHLY BRAD BLOG SUBSCRIPTION	ONE-TIME DONATION
Choose monthly amount... $10 : $10.00 USD - monthly$20 : $20.00 USD - monthly$50 : $50.00 USD - monthly$100 : $100.00 USD - monthly	(Snail mail support to "Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028" always welcome too!)

As we were forced to ask several times on today's BradCast: What the hell is up with Republicans and election fraud in Michigan?! But it's not only in Michigan today, as it turns out. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

In upstate New York, in a Rensselaer County city named Troy on Wednesday, a Republican city councilwoman named Kim Ashe-McPherson pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the submission of three fraudulent absentee ballots in both her primary and general election last year. It's a somewhat remarkable and expansive story of apparently a whole bunch of Republican criming going on in Troy and Rensselaer County, with the Albany Times Union describing Ashe-McPherson as "the first person snared in a federal grand jury investigation examining widespread ballot-fraud allegations in Rensselaer County."

Another separate probe by State Police appears to be examining fraud in Troy's Mayoral race, while the GOP Mayor and a whole bunch of GOP County officials have been subpoenaed and/or had their phones seized by law enforcement in recent months. Ashe-McPherson's absentee ballot fraud was apparently carried out with the help of an unnamed insider official at the Rensselaer County Board of Elections. "Earlier this year," the paper notes, "Jason Schofield, the Republican commissioner for the county's Board of Elections, was subpoenaed in connection with the federal investigation." But there's a whole lot of other GOPers who also seem tied into this, and may end up in handcuffs in the days ahead.

Is it any wonder that Republicans accuse Democrats of voter fraud all the time, given that Republicans seem to be constantly committing it themselves?

But things are even more insane in the great state of Michigan. You'll recall that recently, 5 of 10 Republican Gubernatorial candidates vying for the GOP nod to take on Michigan's Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer this November were disqualified from the ballot, after the state Bureau of Elections discovered they had submitted some 68,000 fraudulent petition signatures between them in an attempt to qualify for the ballot. Well, the trouble continues for at least one of the remaining candidates who did manage to qualify without cheating.

All of the GOP gubernatorial hopefuls in MI are 2020 election deniers (despite Joe Biden having defeated Donald Trump in the state by about 150,000 votes, as confirmed by a months long investigation by the GOP-controlled state Senate). But one of the most ardent of the deniers --- and a leading candidate now that the others have been disqualified --- 40-year old Ryan Kelley, was arrested and charged by federal officials on Thursday for his role in the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Kelley stands accused, according to the criminal complaint, of disruptive conduct, injuring public property and entering restricted space without permission. Documents filed in court allege he is seen on video that day waving crowds into the Capitol after police lines were defeated. He faces up to a year in prison and a fine as high as $100,000. Perhaps this will actually help his bid for the GOP nomination on August 2nd!

But that's not all we have to report out of MI today, particularly when it comes to GIO election fraud.

Last week, the organizer of a GOP petition effort to qualify a ballot initiative known as "Secure MI Vote", announced they missed the deadline to submit the number of signatures needed. Why did the effort behind this scheme to supposedly curb election fraud with severe new restrictions on voting fail? Election fraud, of course! The organizers discovered some 20,000 signatures they had gathered were fraudulent! (Hey, at least they checked them before turning them in, unlike those 5 GOP Gubernatorial candidates!)

The scheme, however, is even slimier than it sounds. Most of the provisions in the so-far-failed initiative had already been passed by the GOP state legislature, but vetoed by Democratic Gov. Whitmer. But, thanks to a loophole in MI state law, once a ballot initiative qualifies for the ballot, the Legislature is then welcome to pass it into law on a simple, veto-proof majority vote. That was the plan that seems to have failed here.

We're joined today to discuss the entire fine mess by NANCY WANG, Executive Director of the non-partisan, pro-democracy group Voters Not Politicians which, in 2018, enlisted volunteers (rather than corrupt paid contractors) to collect more than 400,000 signatures to place an initiative on MI's ballot for an Independent Redistricting Commission. The measure was successfully adopted by state voters.

"There are so many things wrong right now with the GOP and what they're trying to do with voting rights in Michigan," Wang explains. "What's really caught them is this mixture of incompetence and hypocrisy. They're selling themselves to the voters as the party that's going to 'protect' us from fraud. The only fraud they can demonstrate in our election is what they have inside their own camp. It's ironic, at the very least, that they have been the victim of their own fraud, when they've tried to victimize voters with all of these shenanigans."

Wang walks us through those "shenanigans" and various "loopholes" in state law that allow, for example, petition gathers to be paid by the signature and to lie to voters about the initiative they are asking them to sign on to. In this case, while the GOP group was clear that this measure would never actually be on the ballot, signature gatherers reportedly told prospective signers that the plan was simply to put these issues --- like instituting extreme Photo ID restrictions and restricting absentee voting --- before voters.

"This group is headed by the GOP, funded by the GOP, and they're using the citizens' petition process, lying to voters to sign this thing so that they can do an end-run around the voters," charges Wang. "They're never going to put these provisions on the ballot, they were very clear about that. They were just going to ride this loophole to the legislature to get these voter suppression measures passed." Not that that's what their signature gatherers told people on the ground, however.

"It's about dishonesty. It's about misleading voters. It's about trying to game the system of citizens' petitions. I don't think you could put anything in place that would stop people who don't have any limits whatsoever, any standards that they'll abide by, to further their agenda," Wang tells me.

Next, a story we ran out of time for on our previous BradCast, covering results and other fallout from Tuesday's midterm primaries in seven states. You may recall our coverage of a voting system disaster in Clackamas County, Oregon a couple of weeks ago, where a problem with smeared barcodes printed on vote-by-mail ballots resulted in them being rejected by the computer tabulators. The local County Clerk, in that case, ordered tens of thousands of those otherwise perfectly valid ballots to be duplicated by hand, one-by-one, so they could be run through the tabulators, rather than simply counting them in public by hand.

Well, guess what? It appears the very same thing happened in San Joaquin County, California this week, with 25 to 30% of the County's mail ballots being rejected by the computer scanners. And, once again, rather than hand-counting them, the County is duplicating each and every one of them by hand, this time with the help of about 13 employees from the printing company who screwed up in the first place.

I don't know about you, but I don't want my ballot "remade" behind closed doors by either a County election official OR some schmoe from a commercial printing outfit. But maybe that's just me. In any event, San Joaquin voters may have to wait a bit longer than usual this year for final results in their critical midterm primaries.

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with great news for war profiteering Big Oil companies (if terrible news for the rest of us); lousy news about snow disappearing from the previously snow-covered Alps; but some better news regarding the Biden Administration's move to create a new marine sanctuary and end the use of single-use plastic in our national parks...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

MONTHLY BRAD BLOG SUBSCRIPTION	ONE-TIME DONATION
Choose monthly amount... $10 : $10.00 USD - monthly$20 : $20.00 USD - monthly$50 : $50.00 USD - monthly$100 : $100.00 USD - monthly	(Snail mail support to "Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028" always welcome too!)

We've got yet another jam-packed BradCast for ya today, with results of note --- as we have them so far --- from the 7 states which held primaries on Tuesday. Then, we're joined by our guest with some helpful insight on what Democrats and progressives should learn from this year's elections to date and some of his critical concerns about the upcoming hearings by the bipartisan U.S. House Select Committee investigating January 6, 2021 insurrection. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

First, we fly through an extremely curated selection of results from several key races on Tuesday. Among them...

• IOWA: Retired Navy Admiral Mike Franken upset former U.S. Rep. Abby Finkenauer in the state's Democratic U.S. Senate primary. He will face off against 88-year old, six-term U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley. Also noteworthy in the Hawkeye State: progressive Democratic criminal justice reformer Kimberly Graham won the Democratic primary for prosecutor in Polk County (Des Moines), where she is likely to win this November.
• MISSISSIPPI: Two-term Republican Rep. Michael Guest was forced into a runoff by GOP voters as punishment for having voted in favor of a bipartisan, outside Commission to investigative the January 6th insurrection.
• MONTANA: Donald Trump's disgraced, scandal-plagued, forced-to-resign Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is locked in a tight race to win his old job back as a U.S. Congressman. The final results of the close race with state Sen. Al Olszewski, which Zinke leads by about 1,000 votes as of airtime, will be held up by a day or two due to a ballot printing error that will require, under state law, that all ballots now be hand-counted.
• NEW JERSEY: While there may have been races of note there, we didn't have time for ANY of them today! Sorry about that, NJ! (I know. Always the bridesmaid...)
• NEW MEXICO: Seasoned TV weather guy Mark Ronchetti won the GOP primary for Governor after promising to increase the state's already record oil production, deriding new standards in state schools for increased instruction on race (in a state that is half Hispanic and has 23 federally recognized Native American tribes and nations), and by slamming his November opponent, Democratic Gov. Michelle Luhan Grisham, for closing in-person schooling during the worst pandemic in 100 years. Also: Progressive Democrat Gabriel Vasquez was victorious in the 2nd Congressional District race to take on GOP Rep. Yvette Herrell in what is seen by Dems as a possible House pickup this November.
• SOUTH DAKOTA: The state's only House Member, Republican Dusty Johnson, easily won his primary despite voting to certify the 2020 election results and in favor of the January 6 Commission. Shamefully, there is no Democrat running for the state's single At Large Congressional seat. Of greater note, a ballot proposition that would have raised the threshold for passage of certain future ballot propositions to 60% was soundly rejected by voters. That proposition was meant to make it harder to pass a ballot proposition this November that would expand Medicaid under ObamaCare to state residents. Similar expansions measures have been adopted by voter initiatives in about 7 other states. GOP lawmakers in SD must really hate their own constituents.
• CALIFORNIA: All statewide office holders are Dems, so there isn't much drama there. But two local contests have received quite a bit of national notice. The Los Angeles Mayoral race will go to a runoff, after Trumpy Republican real estate billionaire turned "Democrat" Rick Caruso failed to clear the 50% bar, despite dropping some $40 million of his own money into the race. He'll face progressive Rep. Karen Bass, previously seen as the favorite to win until Caruso and his money showed up, in the November runoff. But, interestingly, receiving as much or more notice from national corporate news outlets than almost any other race on Tuesday, voters recalled progressive criminal justice reformer, Chesa Boudin, after two and half years as San Francisco's District Attorney. Predictably, national media is (mis)reporting this as a story of "failed progressive policies" that resulted in rampant crime in the city, despite the fact that overall crime decreased during Boudin's tenure.

We're then joined by longtime progressive champion, journalist, and author JOHN NICHOLS of The Nation for analysis of Tuesday's contests --- and those from week's past --- along with his concerns and warnings about the upcoming January 6 hearings in the House.

As to the primaries so far this season, Nichols observes, among other things that while "Republican turnout is very spiked" and Dems "not so spiked", that is "not necessarily a complete disaster" for Democrats. He also notes that "progressives are winning a lot of Democratic primaries" and "in some unexpected and really interesting places".

"Despite what a lot of the pundits will tell you," he argues, means that "the grassroots Democratic voters seem to be sending a very clear signal that they want to go up against these Trump Republicans in this very tough year with clearly defined progressive candidates."

While he offers thoughts on the recall defeat of progressive District Attorney Boudin in San Francisco, Nichols also observes that criminal justice reformers are actually still winning elections in many other places around California and elsewhere. (See, for example, a progressive criminal justice reformer victories in neighboring counties to San Francisco and Kim Reynolds in Des Moines, IA, as mentioned above, as just two such examples.)

Then, it's on to the upcoming January 6 hearings, where Nichols has both advice and concerns, particularly about what the Committee will ultimately offer in their critical recommendations. His greatest concerns seem to center on what Democrats are willing to compromise on in order to find unanimity with the Committee's anti-Trump, but still hard-right Republican Vice Chair Liz Cheney.

Among Nichols' top hopes for the Committee: Recommendations that Congress adopt a resolution that bars insurrectionists like Donald Trump from office, as per Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment; and (in what will clearly be a much heavier lift for the Committee's Republicans like Cheney), a call to abolish the Electoral College.

But will the hearings ultimately make any difference to a divided nation, with so many already having hardened their positions on Trump and his attempt to steal the 2020 election? We've got a whole lot to discuss with Nichols today, so I hope you'll tune in!...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

MONTHLY BRAD BLOG SUBSCRIPTION	ONE-TIME DONATION
Choose monthly amount... $10 : $10.00 USD - monthly$20 : $20.00 USD - monthly$50 : $50.00 USD - monthly$100 : $100.00 USD - monthly	(Snail mail support to "Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028" always welcome too!)