Greg Palast

Here's a little-known story that people don't know about what happened in Georgia. Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger’s no hero. He thought that he had disqualified enough votes to give Trump the win, because they disqualified so many. But what they didn't expect was groups like Rainbow PUSH, Black Voters Matter Fund, and the Transformative Justice Coalition, who manned phone banks. When a ballot is disqualified in Georgia, you have the right as a voter to go in and “cure” it — fix it. So if you used a red pen, you refill out the ballot in black. If you signed your signature in a different way than when you registered or on your driver's license, you can re-sign it. And these groups literally got tens of thousands of people to go into County Clerk's offices and fix their ballots — which Raffensperger has told me he wasn’t expecting. He was dead shocked. It wasn't the Democratic party that did this. The Democratic party sat on its hands. But the activists went out and got thousands and thousands of voters to go back to the County Clerk’s office and fix their ballots. And that's what put Biden over the top, and ultimately put Ossoff and Warnock in the Senate, because of this tremendous grassroots effort. Raffensperger thought that he had beaten them, but he wasn’t going to go to jail for Trump. That's where Raffensperger drew the line. That doesn't make him a hero. It makes him a co-conspirator who got cold feet and jumped out of the getaway car. ➡️ @RickSmithShow 📺 youtu.be/r9hpzgK5QKU 🔊 linktr.ee/RickSmithShow

The January 6th committee has subpoenaed 14 GOP operatives from seven states to ask them who is behind their very strange, and very dangerous attempt to overturn the election, by providing seven sets of phony electors. What are electors? Those are the people who actually vote for president of the United States. Look high and low in the Constitution and you will not find the right to vote in our Constitution. Rather, the president is picked by the electors and the electoral college. But there's also an alternative way of picking presidents, which is using the 12th Amendment. Let me explain… What happened was, on January 6th, Vice-President Mike Pence received seven slates of electors, but not the electors who were voted by the people of the states. These fake slates of electors were from Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It was not the electors for Joe Biden, who had won those states, rather it was a bunch of GOP operatives, who fraudulently claimed their states had voted for Trump. These alternative electors had their own little private electoral college meetings and they elected Donald Trump for their states, which would make him president of the United States. You might think, this is nuts, you can't just get a bunch of people together in a room and say, I think we'll have Trump again. It's not a joke, because under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, it's what happens when there are not enough electors to become president. You have to win 270 electoral college votes. So what these characters have done is they provided alternative lists of electors. If those electors were accepted over the ones that were submitted by the states themselves, Trump would have been reelected. Now, Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the January 6th Committee wants to know who was behind this scheme, because it's a fraud upon the government. This looks like a crime. Chairman Thompson. I'm going to give you a hint: Donald Trump. This went straight to the Oval Office.

Now that a special grand jury is being impaneled at the request of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to investigate interference in the 2020 election, I don’t think it’s just Donald Trump that’s in trouble. There were 29 phone calls between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — twenty-nine — not just one. The Republicans are claiming it's a political hit job. However, there was a panel of 20 Atlanta Superior Court judges — every one of them Republican appointees — who approved Willis' request. The special grand jury, which has subpoena power, will commence on May 2, 2022, and will have 12 months to conduct an investigation into "potential disruptions to the lawful administration of the 2020 elections."

I don’t think it’s just Donald Trump that’s in trouble now that a special grand jury is being impaneled at the request of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to investigate interference in the 2020 election. The Republicans, including Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, were playing fast and loose with accusations of voter fraud. I wouldn’t be surprised if Raffensperger gets cuffed. And, if there is justice, he should be breaking rocks in a chain gang. There were 29 phone calls between Trump and Raffensperger — twenty-nine — not one. Raffensperger released one, where he looks like a man for all seasons. I’d like to get the recordings of those other calls. And I’m sure the grand jury will want to hear them too. I don’t know how many were recorded, but I want to know what’s in those other calls, and to what extent Raffensperger and his office were playing games with Trump. “Look, all I want to do is this; I just want to find 11,780 votes.” — Donald Trump speaking to Brad Raffensperger in a call recorded on January 2, 2021 Understand, the guy that Trump is speaking to, Brad Raffensperger, there’s probably no one in the country who is more vicious when it comes to false, crazy, wild, and unsupported accusations of voter fraud by Democrats than Brad Raffensperger… He really is the Purge’n General of Georgia. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is no hero. This is the guy that wrongly removed 198,000 legitimate voters from the voter rolls of Georgia. We have their names and addresses. I did the investigation, the ACLU put out my report, Black Voters Matter went to federal court to get the people put back on before the election. And if you watched Democracy Now!, you’d know that I was, literally, physically chasing Brad Raffensperger all over the Capitol to get him to go over that list, as a federal court ordered him to. When you talk about Jim Crow tactics, this guy is the best in the nation — and I don’t mean that as a compliment, I mean it as a warning. I think Trump was shocked that he didn’t get the cooperation from Raffensperger. And he didn’t get it for a simple reason; Raffensperger mucked with the numbers as much as he could before the election, but when the count came through, he wasn’t going to serve five to life for Donald Trump.

In the days between the November 3rd, 2020 presidential election and January 6th, 2021, the day Congress was scheduled to certify Joe Biden as winner and next occupant of the White House, Donald Trump and his inner circle were working to subvert the will of the American people. The plot that proceeded the pro-Trump violent insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6th, involved conservative lawyer and Trump advisor, John Eastman, who argued that the Constitution’s 12th Amendment gave then Vice President, Mike Pence, the discretion to decide which states’ electoral votes should be counted if there was a dispute — because GOP legislators had already been primed to make baseless allegations that widespread voter fraud had tainted the election. The plot would have several key states submit competing slates of electors, thereby throwing the election result into dispute. The 12th Amendment dictates that if no candidate achieves the necessary majority, the matter goes to the House of Representatives to be decided, where each state is given one vote. On January 6th, 2021, the Republicans controlled 26 state delegations, just enough to overturn the will of the people and award the election victory to Trump. In this edition of Between the Lines, we speak with bestselling author and investigative journalist, Greg Palast, who has been reporting on voter suppression issues for 22 years. In his recent article titled “What do you call a failed insurrection? Practice” he explains how the same elements in the unsuccessful plot to steal the election in 2020 will likely be executed again by Trump and the GOP in the 2024 election. Palast warns that, unless we can preserve democracy in this year’s 2022 midterm election, Trump and the Republicans could very well succeed. Transcript: https://www.gregpalast.com/how-trump-and-the-gop-could-steal-the-election-in-2024/

Our action partner, Black Voters Matter, boycotted Biden’s speech in Georgia on the voting rights bills, refusing to act as a photo op prop. Understand the frustration: we’ve been screaming about Georgia as Jim Crow central for 8 years. Laws alone won’t help: we need the Justice Department to stomp on the new "voter fraud vigilante" challenge system we uncovered. We need enforcement of the laws we have, Joe. Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/georgias-original-sin-and-the-2022-secret-vote-crushing-scheme/

Drive Time host Dave Glover and investigative journalist Greg Palast discusses the tyranny of the extraction industry, plus the latest on the Steven Donziger and Julian Assange cases.

These are the only states that would be policed under the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the requirement to “pre-clear” new, racially biased, voting procedures, such as limitations on early voting: Alabama Georgia Louisiana Mississippi North Carolina South Carolina Texas Virginia Don’t get me wrong, the strangling of the John Lewis Act by filibuster, unlike the overhyped For the People Act, could be the death blow to a democratically elected Congress. In 2013, Justice Kennedy said the Voting Rights Act would have been constitutional if it didn’t target specific states, a suggestion from New York City which was then under pre-clearance review. While the new list is a rogues gallery of bad actors, there are real dangers in Ohio, Wisconsin, Arizona and Florida, not on the list. The Democratic Party has to grasp that vote suppression is serious in almost every state. Ironically, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema may be the victim of her own obstructionism. Even with its limitations, the John Lewis Act would’ve been a very powerful weapon. For example, the act would absolutely have prevented Cobb County, Georgia, from closing six of 11 early voting stations, all six in African-American neighborhoods. So what now? While Attorney General Merrick Garland his filed suits against parts of Georgia’s new Jim Crow SB 202, action so far is slow, limited, and scatter shot. Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/strangling-of-john-lewis-voting-rights-act-could-be-death-blow-for-democratically/ Subscribe to our newsletter: https://www.gregpalast.com/subscribe/

This week, the Senate Republicans filibustered the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and stopped it from being voted into law in the Senate, even though there was a majority of 51 votes. A filibuster is just, literally, talking a bill to death so that the Senate cannot get on with its work. To close off that trick, to stop a filibuster, you need 60 votes, and only one Republican, Lisa Murkowski, crossed the line to vote for the bill. Now, understand, the filibuster was specifically created by Southern Democrats after the Civil War for one single purpose: to prevent voting rights legislation and the protection of black people. In fact, one of the only times it was ever used was in 1922 to block the passage of a national law against lynching. So, until very recently, it’s been used almost exclusively for one purpose, that is to block rights of black people to vote. Now, it's been used lately by Republicans for all kinds of things, but basically it's a Jim Crow tactic.

This is not about vaccinations, this is about STUPID. There’s a pandemic of pin-heads, an epidemic of stupid.