National: Justice Department Warns States on Voting Laws and Election Audits | Katie Benner/The New York Times

The Justice Department on Wednesday sent another warning shot to Republican state legislatures that have initiated private audits of voting tabulations broadly viewed as efforts to cast doubt on the results of the presidential election. The department warned that auditors could face criminal and civil penalties if they destroy any records related to the election or intimidate voters in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 and federal laws prohibiting voter intimidation. The admonishment came in election-related guidance documents issued as part of the department’s larger plan to protect access to the polls, announced by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in June. Another document released on Wednesday outlined federal laws on how ballots are cast and said that the department could scrutinize states that revert to prepandemic voting procedures, which may not have allowed as many people to vote early or by mail. The warning was the Justice Department’s latest effort to alert state lawmakers that their audits could run afoul of federal law. Department officials cautioned the Republican-led Arizona State Senate in May that its audit and recount of the November election in Maricopa County, widely seen as a partisan exercise to fuel grievances over Donald J. Trump’s election loss, may be in violation of the Civil Rights Act.

 

Full Article: Justice Dept. Warns States on Voting Laws and Election Audits – The New York Times

Michigan: ‘I feel afraid’: Detroit clerk Winfrey testifies to U.S. House panel on death threats she received | Melissa Nann Burke George Hunter/The Detroit News

Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey told a U.S. House panel on Wednesday that she and her election workers have received threats of violence as a result of false claims of a stolen election by former President Donald Trump, causing her to lose staff and to live in fear. Winfrey, in testimony before the House Administration Committee, compared her experience to what happened to members of Congress when pro-Trump rioters breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. “Except they’re coming to our homes, and they’re making us very uncomfortable,” Winfrey said. “Some of my colleagues have been shot at, simply because of what we do. All of us have been threatened — and because we’re trying to represent our community,” she added. “If it weren’t for the work of local election officials, none of you would be here in this room. We just want to uphold democracy. We just want to ensure that every one votes. It is unfair. It’s unfair that we’re attacked for doing our job. I feel afraid.” The threats against Detroit elections workers led to five of Winfrey’s senior staff going on leave, and one who retired, she said. They didn’t come back until after the election was canvassed and certified, she added. “The overall climate at the Department of Elections is one of fear, almost,” Winfrey said, noting that several staffers were hospitalized with COVID-19 after the election. “People are wanting to retire.” The threats against Winfrey included a White man, whom she estimated at 6-foot-3 and 250 pounds, who approached her while she was walking in her neighborhood and accusing her of “cheating,” telling her, “You are going to pay dearly for your actions in this election!” Winfrey, who is Black, described the man’s manner as threatening, and that he was coming closer to her, telling her he had tracked her down at her home after waiting for her at her office.

 

Full Article: Winfrey testifies before House panel on threats to election workers

National: Department of Justice launches task force to address violent threats against election workers | John Kruzel/The Hill

The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Thursday launched a task force aimed at combating violent threats against election workers following a spike in such incidents tied to the 2020 presidential election. The announcement comes after the DOJ last month indicated that criminal law enforcement would play a key role in the Biden administration’s push to protect voting rights and safeguard elections. “A threat to any election official, worker, or volunteer is a threat to democracy,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, who will lead the effort. “We will promptly and vigorously prosecute offenders to protect the rights of American voters, to punish those who engage in this criminal behavior, and to send the unmistakable message that such conduct will not be tolerated.” The Hill has reached out to the DOJ requesting a tally of ongoing investigations, charges filed and any convictions secured. An April survey of local election workers for the Brennan Center for Justice found that nearly 1 in 6 respondents received threats of violence, and almost 1 in 3 said they feel unsafe because of their job. The surge in violent threats, fueled in large part by former President Trump’s repeated lies about the 2020 election being stolen, has prompted growing alarm among Democratic lawmakers and voting rights advocates that election workers could leave their posts in droves.

 

Full Article: DOJ launches task force to address violent threats against election workers | TheHill

National: Justice Department warns states to follow federal law in election audits and voting changes | Pete Williams/NBC

The Department of Justice notified states Wednesday that they must follow federal law when conducting post-election audits or changing election procedures. “We are concerned that if they are going to conduct these so-called audits, they have to comply with federal law and can’t conduct them in a way that’s going to intimidate voters,” a senior department official said. In two guidance documents, the Justice Department also said states should not assume that reverting to pre-pandemic voting procedures provides them a safe harbor from potential legal challenges. “States should not conclude that because they ran a voting system in a certain way before the pandemic, they’re free to go back to it, even if doing so has a racially discriminatory impact or is motivated by racial reasons,” the official said.

 

Full Article: Justice Dept. warns states to follow federal law in election audits and voting changes

National: As Trump pushed for probes of 2020 election, he called acting Attorney General Rosen almost daily | Josh Dawsey and Devlin Barrett/The Washington Post

President Donald Trump called his acting attorney general nearly every day at the end of last year to alert him to claims of voter fraud or alleged improper vote counts in the 2020 election, according to two people familiar with the conversations. The personal pressure campaign, which has not been previously reported, involved repeated phone calls to acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen in which Trump raised various allegations he had heard about and asked what the Justice Department was doing about the issue. The people familiar with the conversations spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive legal and political issues that are not yet public. Rosen told few people about the phone calls, even in his inner circle. But there are notes of some of the calls that were written by a top aide to Rosen, Richard Donoghue, who was present for some of the conversations, these people said. Donoghue’s notes could be turned over to Congress in a matter of days, they added, if Trump does not file papers in court seeking to block such a handover. In addition, both Rosen and Donoghue could be questioned about the conversations by congressional committees examining Trump’s actions in the days after the election. The Justice Department recently notified Rosen, Donoghue and others who were serving there during the end of Trump’s presidency that the agency would not seek to invoke executive privilege if they are asked about their contacts with the president during that period. That posture — which the letter to Rosen calls a departure from normal agency practice — means that individuals who are questioned by Congress would not have to say the conversations with the president were off-limits. They would be able to share details that give a firsthand account of Trump’s frantic attempts to overturn the 2020 election and involve the Justice Department in that effort.

 

Full Article: Trump called acting AG Jeffrey Rosen repeatedly over false election claims – The Washington Post

National: Republican Legislators Curb Authority of County, State Election Officials | Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline

Republican lawmakers this year passed an unprecedented bevy of bills targeting the authority of state and local election officials, a power grab that might allow partisan legislators to overturn future election results by claiming there was fraud. GOP legislators in at least 14 states have enacted 23 new laws that empower state officials to take control of county election boards, strip secretaries of state of their executive authority, or make local election officials criminally or financially liable for even technical errors, according to Protect Democracy, a left-leaning Washington, D.C.-based voting rights nonprofit. Secretaries of state and county election officials around the country, many of them Republican, resisted pressure from former President Donald Trump and his allies to decertify the November 2020 results and reject huge swaths of mail-in ballots to turn the presidential election in his favor. Eight months later, there is growing concern among those officials that these new laws may cut a path for successful efforts in the future. “Some elected officials didn’t like the results, so they’re trying to rewrite the rules,” said Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who chairs the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State. “This is a breakdown of what it means to live in the United States. It’s an attack on the democracy. It’s an attack on the idea that Americans get to choose their elected officials.” Trump, without evidence, continues to falsely assert that widespread fraud cost him reelection. Election security experts and top national security officials have said voter fraud is rare and that the last election was the most secure in U.S. history. Nevertheless, GOP lawmakers say their changes are necessary to protect the integrity of future elections.

 

Full Article: Republican Legislators Curb Authority of County, State Election Officials | The Pew Charitable Trusts

National: House Democrats push leadership to vote on slimmed-down voting bill | Leigh Ann Caldwell/NBC

A group of House Democrats is launching an internal push on voting legislation, urging their leaders to focus on a few elements, according to a letter obtained by NBC News. A group of 34 House Democrats, all of whom were among the 49 elected in 2018 and many of whom face tough re-election campaigns, asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to bring up new votes, even if the bills wouldn’t be able to get enough support to become law. A group of Senate Democrats voiced optimism this week that they are nearing a deal on a voting bill that could be released as early as next week. The Democrats’ sweeping For the People Act has been stalled in the Senate since Senate Republicans blocked it last month. The signers of the House letter, led by moderate Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., and joined by Texas Reps. Colin Allred and Veronica Escobar, want a new, tailored version of a voting bill to focus on “pre-empt[ing] harmful laws already passing in state houses across the country,” the letter says. They suggest reinstating protections under the Voting Rights Act and other proposals, such as same-day voter registration, voting by mail, 15 days of early voting and requirements for provisional ballots. They suggest eliminating proposals not directly related to ballot access, such as campaign finance.

 

Full Article: House Democrats push leadership to vote on slimmed-down voting bill

National: Native Americans are targets of voter suppression too | Frederick E. Hoxie and Dennis Aftergutt/heHill

“The land was ours before we were the land’s.” With those words, Robert Frost began his poem, “The Gift Outright,” at President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration. Had Frost been speaking to Native Americans, he might have said, “The land was yours before we were the land’s.” Today, we occupy one nation — “theirs” and “ours” — one people under a single national flag. Admittedly, native peoples were often recruited by force to participate in the United States. But they were also persuaded by leaders like Thomas Jefferson, who invited them to “unite yourselves with us, join our Great Councils and form one people with us and we shall all be Americans.” Sadly, foes of Native American rights undercut such promises — and democracy. These efforts endure. Montana Republicans’ new vote restriction legislation could easily suppress the Indian vote. The new measure forbids an individual from delivering another person’s absentee ballot to the polls. That delivery method is essential for home-bound voters in places without mail service — the situation on many Montana reservations and others across the country. And many elderly Indians living on reservations do not have cars. The Republicans controlling Montana’s legislature know that subtracting small numbers of votes can change election outcomes. In 2018, Democratic Sen. Jon Tester “won seven of eight Montana counties containing the headquarters of a federally recognized tribe and received 50.3 percent of the vote statewide.”

 

Source: Native Americans are targets of voter suppression too | TheHill

Arizona: Republican-led ballot review grinds to rocky conclusion, with results expected next month | Rosalind S. Helderman/The Washington Post

The Arizona Senate returned nearly 2.1 million ballots to the control of the state’s largest county Thursday as the GOP-led recount of votes cast in the 2020 presidential election drew to a rocky close, marked by upheaval that is likely to further undermine public confidence in its conclusions, set to be announced next month. A key audit official resigned Wednesday after voicing concerns about a lack of transparency by private contractors hired to lead the effort to scrutinize the ballots cast in Maricopa County — and then, hours later, took back his resignation, telling local reporters that he had negotiated better access to the process. Meanwhile, Twitter on Tuesday suspended a string of accounts that had been promoting the ballot review, including one that had been billed as the audit’s official handle, saying that they violated company policies on “platform manipulation and spam.” Also this week, a previously supportive Republican state senator announced that she believed the audit has been “botched” — the third member of a 16-member caucus to express reservations over a process that was ordered up by the chamber’s GOP leadership. The tumult provided a dramatic capstone to a widely criticized review of the 2020 election that has been decried by election experts and Maricopa County officials and has deeply divided Arizona Republicans.

 

Full Article: Republican-led Arizona ballot review grinds to rocky conclusion, with results expected next month – The Washington Post

Arizona: Why the Election Audit Circus Just Won’t End | Ed Kilgore/New York Magazine

Former President Donald Trump railed against the news media earlier this month for dismissing the “massive number of voter irregularities and fraud” that ostensibly took place during the 2020 election in Arizona. He was responding to an AP report that found fewer than 200 cases of potential voter fraud out of 3 million ballots cast in the state. As the outlet notes, this “align[s] with previous studies showing voter fraud is rare.” But Trump and his allies in Arizona have not been dissuaded by such independent findings, or their own failure to turn up any convincing evidence that Joe Biden only won the state through nefarious means. Since April, private parties answering to a faction of Republicans in the state Senate have been conducting an “audit” of Maricopa County’s 2020 election results. The effort has been derided as incompetent and unwarranted by outside experts, the Justice Department, and even other local Republicans — yet the audit chugs on in self-induced darkness. While the tabulation of votes is supposedly complete, this week top Republicans in the Arizona Senate issued subpoenas demanding even more election materials from the county.

 

Full Article: Why the Arizona Election Audit Circus Just Won’t End

Arizona: Trump supporters raise $5.7M for election audit | Jonathan J. Cooper/Associated Press

Groups connected to prominent supporters of former President Donald Trump’s movement to cast doubt on the 2020 election results have raised $5.7 million for Arizona Republicans’ election audit. Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the little-known firm hired to lead the audit, ended months of silence about who was paying for it and how much it cost Wednesday night. The money from pro-Trump groups dwarfs the $150,000 contributed by the Arizona Senate, which commissioned the audit and hired Cyber Ninjas. Among those leading the fundraising groups are Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor; Sydney Powell, his attorney who filed a number of baseless lawsuits challenging election results; Patrick Byrne, a former chief executive of Overstock.com; and correspondents from the pro-Trump One America News Network. The confirmation that the audit is being overwhelmingly funded by groups promoting false narratives about the election will raise further questions about the validity of the final report. The audit has already been widely discredited by election experts who say Cyber Ninjas and other contractors are biased and using unusual procedures that won’t produce reliable results. “When the sources of the money, and the activity that’s being paid for, and the people being paid are all putting forth falsehoods … it’s incredibly troubling and problematic,” said Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser at the Democracy Fund and a former Maricopa County elections official.

 

Full Article: Trump supporters raise $5.7M for Arizona election audit

Georgia Republicans edge toward a takeover of elections in Fulton County, the state’s largest. | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

Republicans in Georgia’s General Assembly have requested a performance review of the top election official in Fulton County, the first step in a possible takeover of the county’s electoral process that could give the Republican-led legislature more control over an area with the largest concentration of Democratic voters in the state. The request, submitted in a letter on Tuesday by State Senator Butch Miller and signed by about two dozen other Republican state senators, calls for a panel review of Richard Barron, the county election director, over what the lawmakers described as a failure to properly perform risk-limiting audits, a process that helps ensure the correct results and security, after the 2020 election. “We do so as a measure of last resort, having failed to adequately assuage the concern that we, as elected officials, have regarding the integrity of the Fulton County elections process,” Mr. Miller wrote in the letter. Fulton County, which includes much of Atlanta, has a record of problems with its elections. Most recently, its June 2020 primary contest was marred by voting machine difficulties that were exacerbated by the small size and poor training of its staff, causing lines to stretch for hours across the county.

 

Full Article: Georgia G.O.P. Edges Toward Election Takeover in Fulton County – The New York Times

Georgia: Fulton County elections takeover would make history | Ben Brasch/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Experts say Georgia Republicans’ request to audit the elections of Democrat-heavy Fulton County is a historical first in the national story of partisanship invading elections management. A letter first reported by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Thursday shows two dozen state senators calling for a performance review of Fulton elections chief Richard Barron using provisions from Senate Bill 202. Republicans say they are trying to protect Fulton’s voters from the county’s decades of elections mismanagement. Democrats view this effort as a hostile takeover to alter elections results. Fulton Commission Chairman Robb Pitts wrote a letter to Fulton’s legislative delegation leaders Thursday asking them to hold a hearing “to ascertain the legitimacy of this request.” “It is my ultimate fear that this request performance review could be occurring for political reasons and that Fulton County’s voters will be the ones who bear the cost,” Pitts wrote. Gabe Sterling, COO with the Secretary of State’s office, pushed back on that accusation at an Atlanta Press Club event Thursday. “The reality of it is not the state Legislature can come in and overturn results, and that’s what many people on the left side of the spectrum have said about the law,” Sterling said. “It’s simply not true.” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Fulton has been “failing” at elections since 1993 and now Georgia has a method to ensure fair elections.

 

Full Article: Fulton elections takeover would make history

Michigan: Trump’s false election fraud claims fuel GOP meltdown | Nolan D. McCaskill/Politico

Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by more than 150,000 votes in Michigan last November. Trump and the Michigan Republican Party still aren’t over it. The outcome — and the former president’s obsessive efforts to dispute it — has left the state party in disarray, raising questions about the GOP’s focus as it looks to unseat Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in a top battleground state next year. “From a staff and leadership perspective, I don’t know that top-notch professionals would want to go into this quagmire,” said Jeff Timmer, a former Michigan GOP executive director who opposed Trump. “Unless you’re going to talk crazy talk, they don’t want you there.” Much of the trouble can be traced to the 2020 presidential election results, which Trump and his allies have alleged were marked by fraud without providing evidence.

 

Full Article: Trump’s false election fraud claims fuel Michigan GOP meltdown – POLITICO

North Carolina makes long-awaited election system updates, sending data to the cloud | Jordan Wilkie/Carolina Public Press

By the end of the summer, all 100 county boards of elections in North Carolina will be rid of the computer servers that hold voter registration data. The information will be stored in the cloud instead. This is an early step in what will be a yearslong and nearly $3 million process to upgrade state and county election systems to improve security, usability and efficiency, according to the N.C. State Board of Elections. The state will upgrade its voter registration and back-end data management, which are essential for running elections but little seen or understood by voters. The changes will not affect voting machines or the election equipment that makes, scans and counts ballots. Originally designed in 1998 and put in place statewide in 2006, North Carolina’s current election information management system is made up of a network of data servers in the state office and every county, woven together by a network of computer programs. That was “almost another geological era of cybersecurity risk management,” according to John Sebes, co-founder and chief technology officer at the nonprofit Open Source Election Technology Institute. Back then, election administrators were not worrying about computer hacks from foreign nations or even criminals looking to make a buck. “We have to recognize it’s not just the technology front that’s evolved so much; it’s the threat,” Sebes said. The scope of the projects shows how election administration has evolved since the turn of the century. Running elections now requires handling ever more data managed through increasingly complex voting technologies, all while protecting against the kinds of cybersecurity threats that challenge major corporations and the federal government.

 

Full Article: Sending data to the cloud, NC makes long-awaited election system updates – Carolina Public Press

Pennsylvania Republican blasts election audit, rebukes fraud claims | Nathan Layne/Reuters

A Republican lawmaker in Pennsylvania has come out against his colleagues’ “forensic” audit of the 2020 election, becoming the party’s first statewide official to publicly call for an end to the effort and warn of electoral consequences. In an op-ed on Thursday, state Senator Dan Laughlin says that moves to investigate Donald Trump’s loss to President Joe Biden in the state are being made “absent credible evidence of fraud” and won’t change the outcome, as some voters hope. “The current attempt to discredit the 2020 election results runs headlong into an unmistakable truth,” wrote Laughlin, a centre-right Republican from Erie County. “Donald Trump lost Pennsylvania because Donald Trump received fewer votes.” His comments mark a rare public rebuke of Republican state Senator Doug Mastriano from within his own party. Mastriano has been arguing for a comprehensive “forensic” investigation involving the inspection of voting equipment, modeled on a contentious partisan probe ongoing in Maricopa County, Arizona. Mastriano, who has promoted Trump’s baseless stolen-election claims, launched the investigation earlier this month with requests to Tioga, Philadelphia and York counties for access to their voting machines. Mastriano has said he would subpoena the counties if they did not comply by July 31.

 

Full Article: Pennsylvania Republican blasts election audit, rebukes fraud claims | Reuters

Tennessee: Shelby County Commission shoots down ballot-marking machines | Dulce Torres Guzman/Tennessee Lookout

On Monday, Shelby County Commission members voted 8-2 against a resolution to purchase Election System & Software ballot-marking devices and software, citing concerns that the voting machines were vulnerable. Since the 2020 election, the commission has been in debate with the Shelby County Election Commission on how to create confidence in election results. Shelby County commissioners cited an Arizona audit led by Republican state senators who were  inspired by discredited claims that widespread voter frsaaud took the presidency from Donald Trump.  President Joe Biden won Arizona by 10,457 voters, leading some elected officials to ask how states can create irrefutable election results and avoid future allegations. For the 2020 state and federal elections, the Shelby County commission approved the temporary use of hybrid machines that allowed voters to choose between hand-marked ballots and digital technology. Initially, the election commission favored hybrid devices before settling on ES&S devices, the nation’s largest manufacturer of voting technology. The company currently faces lawsuits due to allegations of errors leading to erroneous election results but inquiries found minimal evidence of voter fraud during the 2020 election. This week, the commission made a bipartisan decision to shoot down the election commission’s recommendation to use ballot-marking devices despite the election commission’s threatening to sue.

 

Full Article: Shelby County Commission shoots down ballot-marking machines – Tennessee Lookout

Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos does not want another election probe, says ‘forensic audit’ already happening in Wisconsin | Hope Karnopp/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

A vow from the chairwoman of the Assembly elections committee to conduct a “comprehensive, forensic examination” of the 2020 election is getting pushback from the state’s top Republican and the chair of the state Elections Commission. Rep. Janel Brandtjen issued a statement Monday that her committee would request materials for an investigation “in the coming days,” but has not said what those would include or what the exact timeline would be. “Voters have made it clear that they want a thorough, cyber-forensic examination of tabulators, ballot marking devices and other election equipment, which I will be helping facilitate on behalf of the committee as the chair,” Brandtjen said. But Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said Tuesday that the state’s two ongoing investigations are enough and said he didn’t know what her investigation would prove. “I feel like my colleague Representative Brandtjen is misinformed about what we’re doing in Wisconsin because we are already doing a forensic audit,” Vos said. “Certainly, if she wants to add extra resources from her two staff people in the office to be able to assist the investigators that we have and the audit bureau and what they’re doing, we welcome everybody to offer whatever evidence that they have.”

 

Full Article: Assembly Speaker Robin Vos does not want 3rd Wisconsin election probe

GOP liaison to Arizona audit says he is resigning, won’t be ‘rubber stamp’ on final report | Allan Smith and Jane C. Timm/NBC

The Republican serving as liaison between the Arizona state Senate and the private company conducting a partisan ballot review said Wednesday he intends to resign, citing his inability to back the final product. Ken Bennett, a former Arizona secretary of state, said he made the decision after it became clear he would not regain access to the Phoenix fairgrounds where the private company, Cyber Ninjas, continues its examination of millions of ballots cast last November in Maricopa County. “Right now I’m the liaison in name only,” he told conservative radio host James Harris Wednesday. “I don’t know if that makes me a LINO or what.” Bennett, who has been the public face of the review, was first barred from entering the audit site Friday after he shared some results with outside election experts, according to The Arizona Republic. Those experts told the paper that what they reviewed indicated the auditors’ vote tally was in line with the results reported by the county. “I’ve always tried to act as a man of integrity and honesty and I’m sure I don’t accomplish that all the time, but I cannot put a rubber stamp on a product I am being locked out of its development,” he said Wednesday. “I’m going to step down today. I’ll issue a statement later for the press later this morning.” Arizona state Senate President Karen Fann, a Republican, said in a statement to NBC News on Wednesday that a liaison is no longer needed on-site because the tabulation of votes is complete and ballots will be returned to Maricopa County on Thursday.

 

Full Article: GOP liaison to Arizona audit says he is resigning, won’t be ‘rubber stamp’ on final report

National: ‘A hit man sent them.’ Police at the Capitol recount the horrors of Jan. 6 as the inquiry begins. | Luke Broadwater and Nicholas Fandos/The New York Times

One officer described how rioters attempted to gouge out his eye and called him a traitor as they sought to invade the Capitol. Another told of being smashed in a doorway and nearly crushed amid a “medieval” battle with a pro-Trump mob as he heard guttural screams of pain from fellow officers. A third said he was beaten unconscious and stunned repeatedly with a Taser as he pleaded with his assailants, “I have kids.” A fourth relayed how he was called a racist slur over and over again by intruders wearing “Make America Great Again” garb. “All of them — all of them were telling us, ‘Trump sent us,’” Aquilino A. Gonell, a U.S. Capitol Police sergeant, said on Tuesday as he tearfully recounted the horrors of defending Congress on Jan. 6, testifying at the first hearing of a House select committee to investigate the attack. One by one, in excruciating detail, Sergeant Gonell and three other officers who faced off with the hordes that broke into the Capitol told Congress of the brutal violence, racism and hostility they suffered as a throng of angry rioters, acting in the name of President Donald J. Trump, beat, crushed and shocked them. More than six months after the assault, the accounts of the four uniformed officers — as precise as they were cinematic — cut through a fog of confusion, false equivalence and misdirection that Republicans have generated to try to insulate themselves politically and placate Mr. Trump.

 

Full Article: Capitol Police Officers Testify As Jan. 6 Inquiry Begins – The New York Times

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