Tuesday, September 21, 2021

Last Call For The Big Lie, Con't


Two weeks after the 2020 election, a team of lawyers closely allied with Donald J. Trump held a widely watched news conference at the Republican Party’s headquarters in Washington. At the event, they laid out a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming that a voting machine company had worked with an election software firm, the financier George Soros and Venezuela to steal the presidential contest from Mr. Trump.

But there was a problem for the Trump team, according to court documents released on Monday evening.

By the time the news conference occurred on Nov. 19, Mr. Trump’s campaign had already prepared an internal memo on many of the outlandish claims about the company, Dominion Voting Systems, and the separate software company, Smartmatic. The memo had determined that those allegations were untrue.


The court papers, which were initially filed late last week as a motion in a defamation lawsuit brought against the campaign and others by a former Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, contain evidence that officials in the Trump campaign were aware early on that many of the claims against the companies were baseless.

The documents also suggest that the campaign sat on its findings about Dominion even as Sidney Powell and other lawyers attacked the company in the conservative media and ultimately filed four federal lawsuits accusing it of a vast conspiracy to rig the election against Mr. Trump.

According to emails contained in the documents, Zach Parkinson, then the campaign’s deputy director of communications, reached out to subordinates on Nov. 13 asking them to “substantiate or debunk” several matters concerning Dominion. The next day, the emails show, Mr. Parkinson received a copy of a memo cobbled together by his staff from what largely appear to be news articles and public fact-checking services.

Even though the memo was hastily assembled, it rebutted a series of allegations that Ms. Powell and others were making in public. It found:

  • That Dominion did not use voting technology from the software company, Smartmatic, in the 2020 election.
  • That Dominion had no direct ties to Venezuela or to Mr. Soros.
  • And that there was no evidence that Dominion’s leadership had connections to left-wing “antifa” activists, as Ms. Powell and others had claimed.

As Mr. Coomer’s lawyers wrote in their motion in the defamation suit, “The memo produced by the Trump campaign shows that, at least internally, the Trump campaign found there was no evidence to support the conspiracy theories regarding Dominion” and Mr. Coomer.
 
This is of course the Trumpies hanging Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani out to dry in the wind, along with Newsmax, for Dominion's defamation suit.  The election fraud nonsense was complete horse shit all along, and the existence of this memo only proves that Trump was covering his ass when his plan A, Mike Pence stealing the election for him on January 6th, failed. The plan B "voting machine fraud" failed too, and Dominion is set to win billions in lawsuits as a direct result.

But none of that will come from Trump's pockets, after all, this memo says the White House didn't believe any of it.

Of course, it means the ongoing state investigations are all nonsense and garbage too, but Plan C was always to rig the 2024 contest ahead of time with a boatload of new voter suppression and election-stealing measures in key battleground states, and that has already succeeded. No Democrat will ever win Georgia, Texas, or Florida again, and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin Republicans are still trying to make the Big Lie into the truth in their respective states. 

It's still far from over, but of course they knew they were lying, and the court documents prove it.

Stop Calling Iowa A Battleground State

Iowa's as red as Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana these days, and Democrats need to accept it and move on.

Fewer than one third of Iowans approve of the job Joe Biden is doing as president, a steep drop from earlier this year.

Thirty-one percent of Iowans approve of how Biden is handling his job, while 62% disapprove and 7% are not sure, according to the latest Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll.


That’s a 12 percentage point drop in approval from June, the last time the question was asked. Biden's disapproval numbers jumped by 10 points during the same period. In June, 43% approved and 52% disapproved.

Biden’s job approval has not been in net positive territory in Iowa since March, when 47% of Iowans approved of his performance and 44% disapproved.

"This is a bad poll for Joe Biden, and it's playing out in everything that he touches right now,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer.

The partisan breakdown of the poll shows Biden has nearly no support from Republicans. Just 4% of Republicans say they approve of his job performance as president, while 95% disapprove. Among Democrats, that number is largely reversed, with 86% approving and 7% disapproving. A majority of political independents disapprove, at 62%, while 29% approve.

Biden's job approval rating is lower than former President Donald Trump's worst showing in the Iowa Poll. The former Republican president's worst job approval was 35% in December 2017. Other recent presidents' worst Iowa Poll results: Barack Obama, 36%, in February 2014, and George W. Bush, 25%, in September 2008.

The poll of 805 Iowa adults was conducted Sept. 12-15 by Selzer & Co. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
 
Iowa is as much Trump Country now as the rest of the Midwest.  Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan are battlegrounds, but let's stop pretending Iowa's in any better shape than Kentucky right now. Biden doing worse now, today, than Trump ever did in the state is everything you need to know about the spread of cultism out there.

It's depressing, but true.

StupidiNews!