National

The harassment campaign against U.S. election officials following President Donald Trump’s defeat took an ominous turn on Thursday after a website surfaced that accused them of “treason” and included photographs and home addresses, drawing the attention of U.S. intelligence agencies. The site, along with several associated social media accounts, included photographs of Republican and Democratic officials, with rifle crosshairs superimposed on them. The FBI said on Thursday that it was aware of the issue. U.S. intelligence agencies are also looking into the website and its origins, a source said on Thursday. Several of the officials targeted said the messaging amounted to a call for violence against those who worked to oversee the Nov. 3 election, which Trump lost to Democratic President-elect Joe Biden. They urged Trump to denounce it. “If anyone needs to be reminded that public calls for violence beget violence, this is the clarion call. If blood is spilled, it is on the hands of the president, his campaign, his lawyers, and the silent Republicans standing in the president’s shadow,” said Jim Walden, a lawyer for Christopher Krebs, who oversaw cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security until he was fired by Trump after the election. Georgia’s deputy secretary of state, Jordan Fuchs, likewise pointed the finger at the president. “Trump and U.S. senators have refused to condemn these death threats,” she told Reuters. “In fact, he continues to support those who are actively calling for elections officials to be shot.”

Full Article: Website targeting U.S. election officials draws attention of intelligence agencies | Reuters

National: States targeted in Texas election fraud lawsuit condemn ‘cacophony of bogus claims’ | The Guardian

Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin on Thursday urged the US supreme court to reject a lawsuit filed by Texas and backed by Donald Trump seeking to undo Joe Biden’s victory, saying the case has no factual or legal grounds and makes “bogus” claims. “What Texas is doing in this proceeding is to ask this court to reconsider a mass of baseless claims about problems with the election that have already been considered, and rejected, by this court and other courts,” Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s Democratic attorney general, wrote in a filing to the nine justices.Texas filed the longshot suit against the four election battleground states on Tuesday directly with the supreme court. It asked that the voting results in those states be thrown out because of their changes in voting procedures that allowed expanded mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic.On Thursday afternoon, more than 100 Republican members of the House filed an amicus brief with the court in support of the Texas lawsuit. Trump’s campaign and his allies already have been spurned in numerous lawsuits in state and federal courts challenging the election results. Legal experts have said the Texas lawsuit has little chance of succeeding and have questioned whether Texas has the legal standing to challenge election procedures in other states.

Full Article: States targeted in Texas election fraud lawsuit condemn ‘cacophony of bogus claims’ | US elections 2020 | The Guardian

National: Two reasons the Texas election case is faulty: flawed legal theory and statistical fallacy. | Jeremy W. Peters, David Montgomery, Linda Qiu and Adam Liptak/The New York Times

Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, has asked the Supreme Court to do something it has never done before: disenfranchise millions of voters in four states and reverse the results of the presidential election. The case is highly problematic from a legal perspective and is riddled with procedural and substantive shortcomings, election law experts said. And for its argument to succeed — an outcome that is highly unlikely, according to legal scholars — a majority of the nine justices would have to overlook a debunked claim that President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s chances of victory were “less than one in a quadrillion.” Mr. Paxton is a compromised figure, under indictment in a securities fraud case and facing separate accusations, by several former employees, of abusing his office to aid a political donor. Here are some reasons this case is probably not “the big one” like President Trump has called it. Texas appears to have no claim to pursue the case, which would extend Monday’s deadline for certification of presidential electors in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It relies on a novel theory that Texas can dictate how other states run their elections because voting irregularities elsewhere harm the rights of Texans. The Paxton case fails to establish why Texas has a right to interfere with the process through which other states award their votes in the Electoral College, said Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University and director of its election law program. The authority to manage elections falls to the states individually, not in any sort of collective sense that the Paxton suit implies.

Full Article: Two Reasons the Texas Election Case Is Faulty – The New York Times

National: The Trump team throws in the towel on proving voter fraud | Aaron Blake/The Washington Post

The GOP’s latest effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, like many such efforts before it, is a bit of a mess. The lawsuit, which was filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) and is now joined by the Trump campaign and 17 other Republican attorneys general, wrongly claims that no presidential candidate has lost both Florida and Ohio and won the presidency. (This would be news to John F. Kennedy.) It ridiculously suggests that late vote shifts in key states were astronomically improbable — to the tune of 1 in 1 quadrillion — a claim with which Philip Bump dispatches here. Its attempt to invalidate the vote in four states has already been rebuked by several top Republicans, and not exactly Mitt Romney Republicans. But the GOP’s new focus on this hail-Mary case is also notable for one key reason: It essentially throws in the towel on proving fraud. Ever since the election, President Trump’s legal team and allied lawyers have said they had myriad evidence of actual, provable fraud. This has been rejected in almost every case by the courts, but the Trump team has asserted that its evidence — based largely on affidavits from people involved in the vote-tabulating process — is sound and demonstrates malfeasance. The Texas lawsuit, though, effectively acknowledges that that effort has failed. Rather than claiming evidence of proven fraud, it instead claims that the fraud is actually “undetectable,” because election officials made it so by doing illegal things. And that’s why it wants the results overturned.

Full Article: The Trump team throws in the towel on proving voter fraud – The Washington Post

National: Legislatures across country plan sweeping election reform push | Reid Wilson/The Hill

State legislatures across the country are contemplating sweeping changes to the way elections are administered after a tumultuous presidential contest, one that ended with both the highest voter turnout in American history and the outgoing president baselessly calling its integrity into question. In its wake, election rules have become the hottest topic for state legislatures, especially in presidential battleground states. Lawmakers in a handful of states have begun introducing legislation in so-called pre-filing periods, windows that open before a session begins that enable lawmakers to propose bills. At least 60 election-related bills have been introduced in Texas, 26 are pending in New Hampshire and 41 in Montana, according to a count compiled by the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). “We can expect a busier than ever elections agenda for the states in 2021,” said Wendy Underhill, director of the NCSL’s elections and redistricting programs. In some states, legislators plan to make permanent access to absentee and mail-in voting that were temporarily expanded by the coronavirus pandemic, while others are looking to enact new restrictions on how people can vote.

Full Article: Legislatures across country plan sweeping election reform push | TheHill

National: Security advocates see a possible silver lining in Trump’s election assaults | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

Attacks on the voting company Dominion and the integrity of the election by President Trump and his allies are posing a conundrum for election security advocates. On one hand, they’ve long battled with Dominion and other top voting machine vendors to take security more seriously and be more transparent about their operations so they can be vetted by outside security experts. “If there’s one positive piece that comes out of this it would be greater oversight of election vendors,” David Levine, elections integrity fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, told me. Dominion, along with two other major vendors, control about 80 percent of the U.S. market for election systems. “If there’s a successful cyberattack against one of them, that could have devastating consequences,” he said.On the other hand, the attacks by Trump and his supporters are basically made up out of whole cloth and contrary to all available evidence. Security pros worry these conspiracy theories that go far beyond any legitimate concerns will corrode public faith in elections and convince people it’s not worth turning out to vote. “Unfortunately, there’s a danger that the entire effort to increase cybersecurity in elections will get tarred by the unfounded rantings of a few people,” Lawrence Norden, director of the Election Reform Program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, told me. “There are legitimate things that need to be done to improve the security of our election systems and they should be done regardless of what some crazy people are alleging.”

Full Article: The Cybersecurity 202: Security advocates see a possible silver lining in Trump’s election assaults – The Washington Post

Matt Masterson, CISA’s top election security official, to step down | Sean Lyngaas/CyberScoop

Matt Masterson, one of the U.S. government’s top election experts, is leaving his post as of next week for a role in academia where he will continue to study the disinformation campaigns that have plagued the country, he told CyberScoop on Thursday. Masterson has been a senior adviser at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency since 2018. He led a team that reassured the public that the 2020 election was secure, despite President Donald Trump’s baseless assertions to the contrary. Masterson will join the Stanford Internet Observatory, a team of academics and tech experts led by former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos, which works on election security and social media challenges. Masterson said his last day at CISA will be Dec. 18. At Stanford, “We’re going to unpack what we’ve learned over the last few years [on election security],” Masterson said in an interview, including “what more needs to be done on a broader level.” Masterson said he wants to continue to tackle disinformation campaigns, which could extend to the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine. Experts fear that a large swath of Americans are distrustful of the efficacy of the vaccine, in part because of conspiracy theories that spread online. Masterson, a former election official in Ohio, was part of a team of CISA officials who rebuilt trust between election officials across the country and federal personnel after the 2016 election.

Full Article: Matt Masterson, CISA’s top election security official, to step down

National: 17 Republican Attorneys General Back Trump in Far-Fetched Election Lawsuit | Jeremy W. Peters and Maggie Haberman/The New York Times

Despite dozens of judges and courts rejecting challenges to the election, Republican attorneys general in 17 states on Wednesday backed President Trump in his increasingly desperate and audacious legal campaign to reverse the results. The show of support, in a brief filed with the Supreme Court, represented the latest attempt by Trump loyalists to use the power of public office to come to his aid as he continues to deny the reality of his loss with baseless claims of voter fraud. The move is an effort to bolster a lawsuit filed on Tuesday by the pro-Trump attorney general in Texas that seeks to delay the certification of the presidential electors in four battleground states the president lost. Mr. Trump has been holding out hope that the Supreme Court will hear the case and ultimately award him a second term. Legal experts are skeptical, however, and have largely dismissed it as a publicity stunt. Late Tuesday, the president asked Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican, if he would be willing to argue the case, according to a person familiar with their conversation. Mr. Cruz agreed, this person said. And the president has filed a motion with the court to intervene, which would make him a party to the case. The willingness of so many Republican politicians to publicly involve themselves in a legal campaign to invalidate the ballots of millions of Americans shows how singular a figure Mr. Trump remains in the G.O.P. That these political allies are also elected officials whose jobs involve enforcing laws, including voting rights, underscores the extraordinary nature of the brief to the court. Even in defeat — a reality that a significant number of Republicans refuse to accept, polls show — allegiance to Mr. Trump is viewed as the ticket to higher office.

Full Article: 17 Republican Attorneys General Back Trump in Far-Fetched Election Lawsuit – The New York Times

National: Trump’s effort to steal the election comes down to some utterly ridiculous statistical claims | Philip Bump/The Washington Post

President Trump has moved all of his electoral eggs into a new basket. Now, his efforts to undermine the will of the electorate and seize a second consecutive term in office hinges upon a lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a lawsuit that essentially argues that Texas is harmed by the election results in four states that flipped from red to blue last month. It is a lawsuit that people with much more legal expertise than myself have dismissed out-of-hand as ridiculous given the legal case being made. But it is also a lawsuit that makes statistical claims that are so bizarre, it falls well within my area of expertise to point out that on that rhetoric alone, it’s a disaster. The lawsuit’s statistical case comes down to this question: How many zeros will it take for you to be sufficiently impressed that you’ll ignore basic logic? The author of the lawsuit appears to have settled on the number 15. “The probability of former Vice President Biden winning the popular vote in the four Defendant States — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — independently given President Trump’s early lead in those States as of 3 a.m. on November 4, 2020, is less than one in a quadrillion, or 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,” it reads at one point. “For former Vice President Biden to win these four States collectively, the odds of that event happening decrease to less than one in a quadrillion to the fourth power.” After citing the individual credited for this interesting math, it continues. “The same less than one in a quadrillion statistical improbability of Mr. Biden winning the popular vote in the four Defendant States — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — independently exists when Mr. Biden’s performance in each of those Defendant States is compared to former Secretary of State Hilary [sic] Clinton’s performance in the 2016 general election and President Trump’s performance in the 2016 and 2020 general elections,” it reads. “Again, the statistical improbability of Mr. Biden winning the popular vote in these four States collectively is 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000.” Just complete nonsense.

Full Article: Trump’s effort to steal the election comes down to some utterly ridiculous statistical claims – The Washington Post

National: Trump pressures congressional Republicans to help his fight to overturn the election | Rachael Bade, Josh Dawsey and Tom Hamburger/The Washington Post

President Trump is shifting his focus to Congress after the courts roundly rejected his bid to overturn the results of the election, pressuring congressional Republicans into taking a final stand to keep him in power. Trump’s push is part of a multipronged approach as he also seeks to lobby state and federal lawmakers to give him cover for his unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud, as well as rally support for a last-gasp legal challenge in the Supreme Court that election law experts almost universally dismiss. The president has been calling Republicans, imploring them to keep fighting and more loudly proclaim the election was stolen while pressing them on what they plan to do. He spoke to Arizona GOP Party Chairwoman Kelli Ward and Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), head of the conservative Republican Study Committee, on Wednesday, and is expected to meet Thursday at the White House with several state attorneys general. Meanwhile, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer and point man in the legal fight, has been making similar calls from the hospital, where he is being treated for covid-19. The president also has enlisted Vice President Pence to reach out to governors and other party leaders in key states to see what else can be done to help the president. A person familiar with the calls said Pence has not exerted pressure on lawmakers to take specific actions and sees them as “checking in.” The individual spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly. The vice president’s office declined to comment. Tim Murtaugh of the Trump campaign also declined to comment. Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, Trump’s conservative allies in the House have been privately buttonholing GOP senators, seeking to enlist one to join in objecting to slates of electors on Jan. 6, according to multiple people familiar with their effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss their plans.

Full Article: Trump pressures congressional Republicans to help his fight to overturn the election – The Washington Post

National: Trump’s Challenges to Election Results Face End of the Legal Road | Brent Kimbrell and Deanna Paul/Wall Street Journal

A sweeping multistate legal effort by President Trump and his supporters to override President-elect Joe Biden’s victory has reached the end of the line, with losses in courts at all levels including the U.S. Supreme Court. In the five weeks since Election Day, the Trump campaign and other Republicans have lost at least 40 times in six pivotal states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In several other cases, the campaign or allies withdrew claims after filing them. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court in a one-sentence order turned away a last-ditch effort by Pennsylvania Republicans to invalidate votes from the vote-by-mail system enacted by the state legislature last year. No justice noted a dissent to the order, which was released on the deadline for states to complete election results before the Electoral College meets and casts its vote on Dec. 14. Trump campaign lawyers promised to push forward. “The only fixed day in the U.S. Constitution is the inauguration of the president on January 20,” the Trump campaign’s legal team said. A handful of longshot election challenges remain, including an effort by Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton to sue four battleground states directly in the Supreme Court. He will need the court’s permission to do so, and legal experts say the case has almost no chance at success. In a tweet Wednesday, Mr. Trump called the Paxton case “the big one” and said his campaign would seek to intervene. Dana Nessel, the Democratic attorney general of Michigan, said Mr. Paxton’s lawsuit was a publicity stunt that would fail.

Full Article: Trump’s Challenges to Election Results Face End of the Legal Road – WSJ

Ohio: Stark County to get new Dominion voting machines | Robert Wang/The Canton Repository

After about three years of shopping around for new voting machines, the Stark County Board of Elections finally found a deal that it likes. And the machines will work very similarly to the touch screen machines many Stark County voters have become accustomed to using the past 15 years. Voters are expected to start using the machines in the May 4, 2021 primary. “You put the card in the bottom versus the side. It’s very similar,” said Regine Johnson, the deputy director of the Stark County Board of Elections. “It looks slightly different. The legs are slightly different. The way the paper trail is shown is slightly different. So there will be things that people have to get used to. But it’s not a huge change.” Following the recommendation of staff, the board voted 4-0 Wednesday afternoon to purchase 1,450 Dominion ImageCast X Kit Prime VVPAT touch screen voting machines that each cost $3,500, four high-speed $25,000 optical ballot scanners with more memory capacity, $11,560 ballot printers, a $17,000 server that tabulates votes and a long list of other election equipment. The optical ballot scanners are used to scan absentee mail ballots, provisional ballots and ballots cast at polling locations by voters who don’t want to use touch-screen machines. The total cost of the equipment is $6.45 million.

Full Article: Stark County to get new Dominion voting machines.

National: Letter from more than 1,500 attorneys says Trump campaign lawyers don’t have ‘license to lie’ | Kim Bellware and John Wagner/The Washington Post

More than 1,500 lawyers condemned efforts by the Trump campaign’s legal team to reverse the election results in an open letter that urged the American Bar Association (ABA) to investigate the conduct of the team, including its leader, Rudolph W. Giuliani. “President Trump’s barrage of litigation is a pretext for a campaign to undermine public confidence in the outcome of the 2020 election, which inevitably will subvert constitutional democracy,” the letter says. “Sadly, the President’s primary agents and enablers in this effort are lawyers, obligated by their oath and ethical rules to uphold the rule of law.” The letter escalates the concerns of Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-N.J.) who on Nov. 20 filed complaints with ethics boards in five states calling for Giuliani and other members of the team to be investigated and disbarred. The criticism has been echoed in op-eds and letters by attorneys who have rebuked the team for filing frivolous lawsuits and tarnishing the legal profession. “It’s really unusual to see a coalition like this calling for disciplinary action; it takes a lot,” Deborah Rhode, a Stanford Law School professor and one of the leading American legal ethicists, told The Washington Post on Tuesday. “Many of these letters have been crossing the political aisle, and that testifies to both the egregiousness of the conduct and its seriousness for the rule of law and the democratic process.” The signers include a bipartisan coalition of former ABA presidents, state bar presidents, retired federal judges, retired state Supreme Court justices and attorneys in private practice. Coordinated by the nonpartisan group Lawyers Defending American Democracy, the open letter questions the conduct by Giuliani, as well as current and former Trump legal team members Joseph diGenova, Jenna Ellis, Victoria Toensing and Sidney Powell. Representatives for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

Full Article: More than 1,500 lawyers sign open letter condemning conduct of Trump legal team – The Washington Post

National: As Trump Rails Against Loss, His Supporters Become More Threatening | Nick Corasaniti, Jim Rutenberg and Kathleen Gray/The New York Times

With a key deadline passing Tuesday that all but ends his legal challenges to the election, President Trump’s frenzied campaign to overturn the results has reached an inflection point: Certified slates of electors to the Electoral College are now protected by law, and any chance that a state might appoint a different slate that is favorable to Mr. Trump is essentially gone. Despite his clear loss, Mr. Trump has shown no intention of stopping his sustained assault on the American electoral process. But his baseless conspiracy theories about voting fraud have devolved into an exercise in delegitimizing the election results, and the rhetoric is accelerating among his most fervent allies. This has prompted outrage among Trump loyalists and led to behavior that Democrats and even some Republicans say has become dangerous. Supporters of the president outraged at his loss, some of them armed, gathered outside the home of the Michigan secretary of state Saturday night. Racist death threats filled the voice mail of Cynthia A. Johnson, a Michigan state representative. Georgia election officials, mostly Republicans, say they have received threats of violence. The Republican Party of Arizona, on Twitter, twice called for supporters to be willing to “die for something” or “give my life for this fight.” “People on Twitter have posted photographs of my house,” said Ann Jacobs, the chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, who alerted her neighbors and the police about the constant threats. She said another message mentioned her children and said, “I’ve heard you’ll have quite a crowd of patriots showing up at your door.”

Full Article: As Trump Rails Against Loss, His Supporters Become More Threatening – The New York Times

National: ‘Safe Harbor’ Day Marks a Further Step Toward Sealing Joe Biden’s Victory in Electoral College | Alexa Corse/Wall Street Journal

A federal deadline Tuesday marks the latest formal step toward confirming President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, further reducing options for President Trump and his supporters to fight the results. States were supposed to try to resolve any disputes over the presidential results and finalize their slate of electors for the Electoral College by Tuesday. It is known as the “Safe Harbor” deadline because, if met, Congress should accept a state’s results as conclusive and reject any further challenges, according to federal law. The deadline usually passes with little notice. This year, the Trump campaign and its allies have so far unsuccessfully launched a battery of lawsuits and sought to persuade some state legislatures to overturn the election results, drawing extra attention to the arcane formalities that states and Congress take to confirm the next president in time for the inauguration on Jan. 20. The “Safe Harbor” deadline doesn’t necessarily end those or other lawsuits. But given that Congress is supposed to respect the results of states that meet the deadline, and with the Electoral College vote coming Monday, it narrows the options for challenging the outcome, according to election law scholars. “I don’t think it’s the kind of the deadline that’s going to bring true finality,” said Richard L. Hasen, an election-law professor at the University of California, Irvine. “It’s more like another nail in the coffin.”

Full Article: ‘Safe Harbor’ Day Marks a Further Step Toward Sealing Joe Biden’s Victory in Electoral College – WSJ

National: The Nation Reached ‘Safe Harbor.’ Here’s What That Means. | Nick Corasaniti, Sydney Ember and Alan Feuer/The New York Times

Joseph R. Biden Jr. has already won the presidential election, but on Tuesday he moved one step closer to the White House. By the end of the day, the nation was set to reach the so-called safe harbor deadline, which is generally accepted as the date by which all state-level election challenges — such as recounts and audits — are supposed to be completed. Broadly, that means that President Trump’s efforts to overturn the presidential election are nearing the end of the line. After Tuesday, state courts would most likely have to throw out any new lawsuit challenging the election. That’s because election results that have been certified by the states are now considered conclusive, and by law those states’ Electoral College votes must be counted by Congress. By late Monday, every state but Hawaii had certified its results, and Mr. Biden had secured more than the 270 electoral votes needed to become president.

Full Article: The Nation Reached ‘Safe Harbor.’ Here’s What That Means. – The New York Times

National: Chris Krebs sues Trump campaign, Joe diGenova for defamation | Spencer S. Hsu and Dan Morse/The Washington Post

The former top U.S. cybersecurity official responsible for securing November’s presidential election sued the Trump campaign and one of its lawyers for defamation Tuesday, asserting that they conspired to falsely claim the election was stolen, attack dissenting Republicans and fraudulently reap political donations. Christopher Krebs, who was fired Nov. 17 by President Trump after he refuted the president’s claims of widespread election fraud, singled out comments made almost two weeks later by attorney Joseph diGenova, who said Krebs should face the same punishment inflicted on those convicted of treason because he had asserted that the 2020 election was the most secure in history. “He should be drawn and quartered,” diGenova said on the outlet Newsmax, a third defendant. “Taken out at dawn and shot.” He also labeled Krebs an “idiot” and a “class-A moron” during the segment, which unleashed a flood of social media comments that left Krebs, his wife and several of their young children in fear for their lives, according to the lawsuit. At one point, according to the lawsuit, the Krebs’s 10-year-old child asked: “Daddy’s going to get executed?” The 52-page complaint was filed in Maryland state court in Montgomery County, where diGenova resides. The lawsuit accused diGenova and the Trump campaign of defamation and “intentional infliction of emotional distress.” It labeled Newsmax an aider and abettor. Krebs seeks a jury trial, money and punitive damages and an injunction ordering Newsmax to remove video of the incident.

Full Article: Chris Krebs sues Trump campaign, Joe diGenova for defamation – The Washington Post

National: Conservative Lawsuits Fuel Distrust of Election Results | Jacob Gershman/Wall Street Journal

Phill Kline says he has filed so many legal challenges to the presidential-election results that he can’t keep track. “It’s hard for me to keep up, honestly,” said Mr. Kline, a former Republican attorney general of Kansas who runs the Amistad Project, an election-focused offshoot of the Thomas More Society, a conservative legal group in Chicago best-known for antiabortion and religious-rights casework. The Amistad Project is among a small but committed band of pro-Trump plaintiffs that have targeted battleground states and swelled the dockets with lawsuits aimed at invalidating President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. As the Trump campaign pursues a handful of long-shot lawsuits in two states, outside activists have at least a half-dozen cases pending before state and federal benches. None have been successful, but they have fed into suspicions among Republicans that the election wasn’t run fairly. The affidavits attached to the lawsuits and video evidence purporting to show mishandling of ballots have gone viral among conservatives and provided fuel for critics of expanded absentee voting. State election officials and U.S. Attorney General William Barr have said they have found no evidence of fraud widespread enough to tip the election. Federal cybersecurity officials have called the election the most secure ever conducted. In Georgia, where the viral videos emerged, state investigators have said the recordings show normal operations, with observers watching legal ballots get counted. Some of the groups say their mission extends beyond next week when the Electoral College meets on Dec. 14 and formalizes Mr. Biden’s victory. They haven’t always marched in lockstep with the Trump campaign legal team and are looking for rulings that could affect future elections.

Full Article: Conservative Lawsuits Fuel Distrust of Election Results – WSJ

National: Major cybersecurity firm FireEye says it was hacked in sophisticated nation-state attack | Maggie Miller and Olivia Beavers/The Hill

FireEye, a top cybersecurity firm that has built a reputation for tracking the digital fingerprints in major cyberattacks, has now become a target in a highly sophisticated attack that it says was done by a skilled nation-state. FireEye acknowledged to The Hill and other news outlets on Tuesday that its own systems were penetrated by “a nation with top-tier offensive capabilities.” FireEye, which was a key firm that helped track Russia’s cyberattack on the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 presidential election, did not name who it believes is behind the attack, but its description points to the Kremlin. FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia wrote in a blog post that “based on my 25 years in cyber security and responding to incidents, I’ve concluded we are witnessing an attack by a nation with top-tier offensive capabilities.” “We were attacked by a highly sophisticated threat actor, one whose discipline, operational security, and techniques lead us to believe it was a state-sponsored attack,” he wrote. Mandia noted that FireEye was working with the FBI and “other key partners,” including Microsoft, to investigate the attack. Matt Gorham, the assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division, said in a statement provided to The Hill that “the FBI is investigating the incident and preliminary indications show an actor with a high level of sophistication consistent with a nation state.”

Full Article: Major cybersecurity firm says it was hacked in sophisticated nation-state attack | TheHill

National: Trump’s options dwindle as safe harbor deadline looms | Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney/Politico

President Donald Trump’s effort to snatch a second term through a series of state and federal court challenges has been flaming out for weeks. Now, the calendar has all but extinguished it. Dec. 8 is the so-called “safe harbor” date for the presidential election, a milestone established in federal law for states to conclude any disputes over the results. Trump’s failure to gain traction in litigation, with his lawyers and allies failing to block crucial states from declaring Joe Biden the winner, means the safe harbor deadline stands as another potentially insurmountable reason for the courts to decline to intervene. Trump’s legal team publicly says the safe harbor deadline is meaningless and they’ll simply disregard it. Set by a 140-year-old statute, the date isn’t enshrined in the Constitution, they say. But the campaign’s legal filings tell another story, as Trump’s lawyers pressed courts for urgent action ahead of the deadline midnight on Tuesday and warned of irreparable consequences if they don’t. The last time a presidential election was resolved at the Supreme Court, the safe harbor deadline proved pivotal. And several legal actions seem to be hurtling toward a potential resolution on Tuesday — including a Pennsylvania dispute where Justice Samuel Alito initially asked for responses by Wednesday but decided to expedite further to Tuesday amid speculation about the safe harbor deadline.

Full Article: Trump’s options dwindle as safe harbor deadline looms – POLITICO

‘This Must Be Your First’ – Acting as if Trump is trying to stage a coup is the best way to ensure he won’t. | Zeynep Tufekci/The Atlantic

On the evening of September 11, 1980, my mom was approached by a neighbor who held rank in the Turkish military. He told her to stock up on bread and rice. “Oh, another coup,” she immediately groaned. The neighbor was aghast—he wasn’t supposed to tell anyone what was coming. But my mom, of course, had immediately understood what his advice must have meant. Turkey is the land of coups; this was neither the first nor the last coup it would face. A little more than two decades later, I walked up to a counter in Antalya Airport to tell a disbelieving airline employee that our flight would shortly be canceled because the tanks being reported in the streets of Istanbul meant that a coup attempt was under way. It must be a military exercise, she shrugged. Some routine transport of troops, perhaps? If so, I asked her, where is the prime minister? Why isn’t he on TV to tell us that? Another woman approached the counter. “This must be your first,” she said to the young woman behind the counter, who was still shaking her head. “It’s my fourth.” I told the airline employee that we were not getting on that plane, destined for the Istanbul airport, which I knew would be a primary target. The other woman and I nodded at each other, becoming an immediate coup pod. I went out to secure transportation for us—this airport was not going to be safe either—while she and my 7-year-old son went to retrieve our luggage. “His first too,” I said to her. In political science, the term coup refers to the illegitimate overthrow of a sitting government—usually through violence or the threat of violence. The technical term for attempting to stay in power illegitimately—such as after losing an election—is self-coup or autocoup, sometimes autogolpe.

Full Article: Is Trump Trying to Stage a Coup? – The Atlantic

National: A trio of brutal rulings for Trump’s voter fraud push | Aaron Blake/The Washington Post

Time is running very short on attempts by President Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election. In many ways, it’s already too late. Electors are required to cast their votes for president in each state on Dec. 14, and the “safe harbor” law means states have to resolve any outstanding issues by six days before then. That would be Tuesday. If the last three days are any indication, the Trump team is about to go out in a blaze of not-exactly-glory. Key rulings in Georgia and Michigan are the latest setbacks for the efforts, with judges in three cases issuing significant rebukes — a couple of which were scathing. In Georgia, the legal team representing Gov. Brian Kemp (R) and other top officials, including Kemp’s fellow Republicans, filed a brutal response to the continued litigation. Kemp has been under fire from Trump, including receiving a call from Trump this weekend in which Trump again pressured him to do something to help overturn the state’s election results. The call came shortly before Trump appeared at a rally in the state for the upcoming Senate runoff elections. Kemp, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, all Republicans, have repeatedly rebuked the claims made by Trump and his allies. But in a filing the same day as Trump’s rallies, their legal team went quite a bit further.

Full Article: Legal filings thwart Trump voter fraud effort – The Washington Post

National: Trump’s fired election-security chef compared the president’s false claims about voter fraud to Russian disinformation | Tom Porter/Business Insider

Chris Krebs, the former top US election-security official, has described President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud to Russian disinformation designed to corrode faith in US democracy. In an interview with Axios, Krebs was asked for his view on Trump, who on November 18 fired him from his position as Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the Department of Homeland Security. Krebs had rebutted the president’s claim that the result of the 2020 election was tainted by widespread ballot fraud. “The caller was inside the house,” Krebs told Axios’ Jonathan Swan. “The president is a big part of the disinformation that’s coming out there about the rigged election, but there are absolutely others.” He went on to describe how he coped with Trump’s attempts to undermine faith in the integrity of the election while he was still working for the administration: “One of the questions we asked: ‘What would we do if the Russians were doing this?'”

Full Article: Fired election security chief compares Trump claims to Russian disinfo – Business Insider

National: Republicans Pushed to Restrict Voting. Millions of Americans Pushed Back. | Nick Corasaniti and Jim Rutenberg/The New York Times

Nearly 160 million Americans voted in the 2020 elections, by far the most in history and a level of turnout not seen in over a century, representing an extraordinary milestone of civic engagement in a year marked by a devastating pandemic, record unemployment and political unrest. With all but three states having completed their final count, and next week’s deadline for final certification of the results approaching, the sheer volume of Americans who actually voted in November was eye-opening: 66.7 percent of the voting-eligible population, according to the U.S. Election Project, a nonpartisan website run by Michael McDonald, a University of Florida professor who tracks county-level data. It is the highest percentage since 1900, when the voting pool was much smaller, and easily surpasses two high-water marks of the modern era: the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy and the 2008 election of Barack Obama. Since the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, which gave women the right to vote and roughly doubled the voting eligible population, turnout had never surpassed 64 percent. The shifts that led to this year’s surge in voting, in particular the broad expansion of voting options and the prolonged period for casting ballots, could forever alter elections and political campaigns in America, providing a glimpse into the electoral future. A backlash from the right could prevent that, however. In many ways, the increase in voting is what Mr. Trump and the Republican Party are now openly campaigning against in their floundering bid to overturn his clear loss to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. — whose popular vote lead grew to seven million on Friday. Republicans have portrayed the burgeoning voting ranks as nefarious and the expanded access to voting options as ripe for fraud — despite the fact that the record turnout provided them numerous victories down ballot.

Full Article: Republicans Pushed to Restrict Voting. Millions of Americans Pushed Back. – The New York Times

National: 220 congressional Republicans won’t say whether Biden or Trump won the election, Washington Post survey finds | Paul Kane and Scott Clement/The Washington Post

Just 27 congressional Republicans acknowledge Joe Biden’s win over President Trump a month after the former vice president’s clear victory of more than 7 million votes nationally and a convincing electoral-vote margin that exactly matched Trump’s 2016 tally. Two Republicans consider Trump the winner despite all evidence showing otherwise. And another 220 GOP members of the House and Senate — about 88 percent of all Republicans serving in Congress — will simply not say who won the election. Those are the findings of a Washington Post survey of all 249 Republicans in the House and Senate that began the morning after Trump posted a 46-minute video Wednesday evening in which he wrongly claimed he had defeated Biden and leveled wild and unsubstantiated allegations of “corrupt forces” who stole the outcome from the sitting president. A team of 25 Post reporters contacted aides for every Republican by email and phone asking three basic questions — who won the presidential contest, do you support or oppose Trump’s continuing efforts to claim victory and if Biden wins a majority in the electoral college, will you accept him as the legitimately elected president — and also researched public statements made by the GOP lawmakers in recent weeks to determine their stance on Biden’s win.

Full Article: 220 congressional Republicans won’t say whether Biden or Trump won the election, Washington Post survey finds – The Washington Post

National: Trump loves to win but keeps losing election lawsuits | Alana Durkin Richer/Associated Press

For a man obsessed with winning, President Donald Trump is losing a lot. He’s managed to lose not just once to Democrat Joe Biden at the ballot box but over and over again in courts across the country in a futile attempt to stay in power. The Republican president and his allies continue to mount new cases, recycling the same baseless claims, even after Trump’s own attorney general declared the Justice Department had uncovered no widespread fraud. “This will continue to be a losing strategy, and in a way it’s even bad for him: He gets to re-lose the election numerous times,” said Kent Greenfield, a professor at Boston College Law School. “The depths of his petulance and narcissism continues to surprise me.” In an Associated Press tally of roughly 50 cases brought by Trump’s campaign and his allies, more than 30 have been rejected or dropped. About a dozen are awaiting action. Trump has notched just one small victory, a case challenging a decision to move the deadline to provide missing proof of identification for certain absentee ballots and mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania. Trump has refused to admit he lost, and this week posted a 46-minute speech to Facebook filled with conspiracies, misstatements and vows to keep up his fight to subvert the election. Five more losses came Friday. The Trump campaign lost its bid to overturn the results of the election in Nevada and the Michigan appeals court rejected a case from his campaign. The Minnesota Supreme Court dismissed a challenge brought by GOP lawmakers. And in Arizona, a judge threw out thrown out a bid to undo Biden’s victory there, concluding that the state’s Republican Party chairwoman failed to prove fraud or misconduct and that the evidence presented at trial wouldn’t reverse Trump’s loss. The Wisconsin Supreme Court also declined to hear a lawsuit brought by a conservative group over Trump’s loss.

Full Article: Trump loves to win but keeps losing election lawsuits

National: He did breakthrough work on hacking voting machines. Now he’s beloved by conspiracy trolls | Jeff Pillets/NJ Spotlight News

For right-wing commentators and conspiracy theorists challenging the 2020 election, it looked like the perfect get: a Princeton University professor who can hack a voting machine in seven minutes flat and flip an election without leaving a trace. The extraordinary research of computer scientist Andrew Appel helped fuel a wave of new laws that brought safer voting machines to states across the country. He’s appeared before Congress and has been an expert witness in landmark voting cases that led to electoral reform. Now, his work is being touted by the likes of Sean Hannity and featured in fact-free lawsuits seeking to overthrow the results of the 2020 election. The Trump campaign has gleefully weaponized Appel’s research as well, via misleading, baseless tweets that claim tens of thousands of votes were stolen. Appel, who chaired Princeton’s computer science department for six years, has published dozens of scholarly papers on arcane cyber topics ranging from “floating point proofs” to “deep specification” and “polymorphic lemmas.” His most recent paper is titled “Abstraction and Subsumption in Modular Verification of C Programs.” But it is Appel’s exposing the ability to hack paperless voting machines — identical to those still in use across New Jersey — that gets all the attention. In an interview with NJ Spotlight News, the bespectacled and soft-spoken academic appeared more amused than angry when asked about his scholarly work propping up the fantasies of Trump supporters.

Full Article: Hacking expert shrugs off the trolls | NJ Spotlight News

National: Trump’s false fraud claims are laying groundwork for new voting restrictions, experts warn | Jane C. Timm/NBC