On today’s BradCast, we pick up, in no small part, where we left off on Friday’s show regarding that chilling, newly unearthed, December 16, 2020 draft Executive Order [PDF] created for Donald Trump to allow him to declare a national security emergency, seize the nation’s voting systems, and implement a military coup that would have left him in power after the 2020 election’s actual winner, Joe Biden, was supposed to have been sworn in. We are joined today by the woman whose organization’s federal lawsuit in Georgia was quoted extensively in that draft EO as a pretext for seizing the nation’s voting systems. Of course, the MAGA Mob lied about the ruling they quoted from her lawsuit in the never-issued EO. [Audio link to full show is posted at end of this summary.]
But first, we cover some quick news headlines today…
- Just before airtime, the Fulton County, Georgia Superior Court reportedly approved District Attorney Fani Willis’ request for the creation of a Special Grand Jury to aid her ongoing investigation into the criminal conspiracy to steal the state’s 2020 Presidential election by Trump and others in his cabal, potentially including former WH Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and Trump buddy Sen. Lindsey Graham among others.
- Then, news on the quickly ratcheting tensions in Ukraine, where Russia continues to amass thousands of troops on their eastern border in preparation, according to NATO and the U.S., for an invasion of the former Soviet Union satellite country. Russia, on the other hand, says it has no intention of invading and is simply responding to provocations by NATO and the West. We detail the latest as tensions continue to grow by the hour — along with new military hardware in the region — on all sides.
- Also on Monday, the GOP’s stolen and packed U.S. Supreme Court announced plans to take up two cases next term on affirmative action in college admissions. One case challenges the use of race in Harvard’s admissions policies, the other looks at similar policies at the public University of North Carolina. The Court’s decision to hear these cases, despite multiple cases in recent years confirming the Constitutionality of such policies, signals the likelihood that the newly far-right 6 to 3 Court is looking to overturn long-standing precedent on race-based policies. Such a reversal of otherwise settled law would echo similarly radical moves in other recent rightwing hobby horse cases taken up by this Court regarding abortion, gun rights, voting rights, vaccine mandates, and environmental regulations.
Then we’re joined by MARILYN MARKS, longtime election integrity, security and transparency advocate and Executive Director of the non-partisan Coalition for Good Governance. It was a ruling in the Coalition’s long-standing lawsuit seeking to ban Georgia’s new, unverifiable touchscreen voting systems made by Dominion Voting Systems that was quoted, at length, in the December 2020 draft Executive Order [PDF] that was to direct Trump’s Secretary of Defense to immediately seize the nation’s voting systems and institute a military coup to keep him in office.
The EO quotes a ruling in the Coalition’s case made by U.S. District Court Judge Amy Totenberg just prior to the November 2020 election. In it, as we reported at the time, she recognized the massive vulnerabilities in Georgia’s new Dominion touchscreen Ballot Marking Device (BMD) voting systems, but allowed them for first-time use in the 2020 election anyway. The previous year, as part of the very same lawsuit, Judge Totenberg finally banned the state’s controversial, 20-year old, unverifiable, insecure touchscreen systems made by Diebold, finding the vulnerabilities made them unconstitutional for use in Georgia’s elections. Rather than replace those old systems with verifiable hand-marked paper ballot systems, Georgia’s Republican Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger forced every county in the state to switch to the new, unverifiable Dominion systems which share many of the same problems as those they replaced.
In the draft EO, after citing Totenberg’s 2020 ruling at length, the drafters of the document (likely Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn, among others), falsely claim that “Every defect and hazard of which Judge Totenberg warned, happened in Georgia.”
Marks, whose has joined us many times on this program over the years to discuss her legitimate case to ban those Dominion systems in Georgia (a case which continues), offers her reaction today to seeing a ruling from her case included in the EO drafted for Trump’s military coup.
“I was ready for the whole world to know about our lawsuit — those who don’t listen to you — but this is not the way I wanted to have it happen!,” quips Marks. “Because, of course, it is a totally serious lawsuit and this [EO] is preposterous, silly and crazy. And chilling, as well!”
She says that she was “horrified” when she first saw the news come in via headlines. “It’s just so shocking that this would have gotten on paper anywhere, that anybody could have these ideas to use the judge’s very serious ruling, to take it totally out, twist the words [and] wrap it in a bunch of lies. It’s really so sad and scary.”
Marks notes as well that, while there are indeed very serious vulnerabilities in Georgia’s new voting systems (and others like it in use around the country) making them “hackable”, the evidence-free (and/or wholly inaccurate) claims made by the Trumpers in the EO about them having been manipulated “is just so false. It’s unbelievable that someone could get away with putting that on paper because there’s no evidence that any of those things happened. Yes, there were problems [in Georgia]. Yes, those problems need to be resolved. But certainly not what these people are claiming.”
She also explains why, even if the Pentagon had seized the voting machines in Georgia as the document called for, they were not likely to find the “malware” they pretended was on those systems in November of 2020 because the systems had already been wiped for upcoming municipal elections and the January U.S. Senate runoffs by that time in December.
We go on to discuss how both this newly revealed EO and all of the phony, evidence-free claims that the 2020 election was stolen — as part of Trump’s actual efforts to steal the election — has made the fight for election integrity all the more difficult for real advocates. In response, she argues that many Democrats are now even more afraid to take action on anything that has to do with concerns about voting systems. Some, she notes, are even working to make such systems less transparent in the bargain. “So what we are seeing is some pushback that is really unhealthy in terms of let’s reduce transparency, let’s reduce citizen oversight, thinking that somehow that will quiet the citizens talking about the problems. It’s a dangerous reaction,” warns Marks…
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
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