Newly Released January 6 Tapes Expose GOP Congressman’s Dark Role

New security footage from the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot have revealed possible new crimes in Donald Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election results.

Former Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro and a Trump campaign staffer, G. Michael Brown, were caught on camera handing fake elector documents from Washington and Michigan to aides of Republican Representative Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania on January 5.

The video corroborates what Chesebro admitted in a text message on January 6: that he dropped off fake elector documents to Kelly’s aides a day prior.

The documents ultimately didn’t get to Vice President Mike Pence, who was in charge of certifying the election results, thanks to the Senate parliamentarian refusing to accept the documents from Kelly’s aides. Bizarrely, after the documents were rejected, the aides wandered the halls on the second floor of the Capitol for a half-hour, waiting for instructions.

It’s bad news for Kelly—and even worse news for Chesebro, who is already in trouble in Michigan for his involvement in the fake elector scheme in that state. Chesebro was charged with felony fraud for his efforts to overturn Wisconsin’s presidential election results in June. He was named as a co-conspirator in Georgia’s fake elector charges, where he is cooperating with the state and has pleaded guilty to planning the scheme there. He is reportedly also cooperating with prosecutors in Michigan and Wisconsin.

This new set of evidence could lead to new charges, as it apparently wasn’t previously uncovered by the House January 6 committee, according to journalist Jamie Dupree. And while Kelly’s role was known, the extent of his involvement in the fake electors plot was not. Aside from that, however, the footage shows how close Trump’s cronies got to overturning two key states’ elections, as only the Senate parliamentarian and Vice President Mike Pence stood in their way.

After President Joe Biden announced his plan to rein in Supreme Court corruption Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson promised to stand in his way.

Johnson accused Biden and other Democrats of trying to “change the system that has guided our nation since its founding simply because they disagree with some of the Court’s recent decisions.”

Biden’s plan calls for setting term limits for justices at 18 years and enforcing a binding code of conduct that would require justices “to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity, and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest.” Further, Biden also seeks to undo the court’s recent “presidential immunity” decision through a constitutional amendment called the “No One Is Above the Law Amendment.”

Johnson is probably mostly taking issue with the last point, but he is happy to slam Biden on any and all proposed tweaks, considering his repeated attempts to shield Donald Trump from prison. Johnson slammed the reforms as “ongoing efforts to delegitimize the Supreme Court,” claiming they would “tilt the balance of power and erode not only the rule of law, but the American people’s faith in our system of justice.”

Leonard Leo, the co-chairman of the right-wing Federalist Society, was eager to back up Johnson and criticize the Biden administration on the issue of Supreme Court reform.

“No conservative justice has made any decision in any big case that surprised anyone, so let’s stop pretending this is about undue influence,” Leo said. “It’s about Democrats destroying a court they don’t agree with.”

Unfortunately for Johnson’s argument, the damage to the Supreme Court’s legitimacy has already been done. A poll conducted last year by NPR, PBS NewsHour, and the Marist Institute found that nearly two-thirds of Americans lack confidence in the high court, the lowest number since the poll was first conducted in 2018.

Sixty-eight percent of people said they thought the justices should have term limits. These results spanned the political spectrum. So, actually, Biden’s suggested reforms might boost public opinion of the Supreme Court.

While Biden says he looks forward to working with Congress on the plan to “prevent the abuse of Presidential power, restore faith in the Supreme Court, and strengthen the guardrails of democracy,” it seems like the House speaker has no interest in hearing him out.

“This dangerous gambit of the Biden-Harris Administration is dead on arrival in the House,” promised Johnson.

At least 70 pro–Donald Trump election denialists are working as election officials in key swing states, according to a report published Monday from Rolling Stone and the right-wing extremism research newsletter American Doom.

Officials who had promoted election conspiracy theories were identified in at least 16 counties in six swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. These individuals were identified through scouring coverage of refusals to certify 2020 election results and other denialist behavior, as well as sifting through the social media profiles of election officials in these states.

Across these swing states, Trump loyalists stand ready to disrupt the results of democratically held elections—at least 22 of them have already refused or delayed certification in recent years, indicating likely chaos in November.

Republicans have even begun fighting for the right to refuse to certify elections based on absolutely nothing.

In May, Fulton County election board official Julie Adams launched a lawsuit against the county, hoping to access voting records that she claims she was barred from seeing by Fulton County’s election director, and seeking a court ruling on whether her duty to certify election results is “discretionary, not ministerial, in nature,” according to the suit. Fulton County is a Democratic stronghold.

Adams, a staunch election denier, is backed by the America First Policy Institute, or AFPI, a Trump-supporting think tank. Adams is hoping to upend years of precedent and Georgia state law, according to Protect Democracy, a democratic nonprofit that contends that certifying election results “is a mandatory, ministerial duty, meaning that officials have no discretion to refuse to certify election results.”

While legal experts predict that it’s unlikely a judge will side with Adams, she once again refused to certify the results of a run-off election later in June.

Adams isn’t alone in her state. David Hancock, an election official in Gwinnett County outside of Atlanta, is “working to change” the guidelines around election certification, according to a post on his Facebook page. In March, he refused to certify the results of his county’s presidential primary election, although he has yet to give a real answer as to why.

Georgia has had the highest number of certification refusals since 2020 of anywhere in the country. Its five-person state election board—which American Doom found contained two election-denying conspiracy theorists—has set to work formulating a new rule that would allow election officials to refuse to certify results if a “reasonable inquiry” can be made into claims of election fraud. The Trump-friendly board has been accused of ethics violations after not giving proper notice to its Democratic members about a meeting that it used to advance election rule changes.

All of this is particularly problematic because Republicans believe that refusing to certify the results of an election in and of itself can be used as evidence of election fraud. In a never-issued executive order from December 2020, Trump cited officials in Coffee County, Georgia, refusing to certify the results of the 2020 election as proof that voter fraud had likely occurred, and reason enough to seize voting machines.

Should the refusal to certify results become discretionary, Republicans will have a pile of so-called evidence to point to in November. It’s entirely likely that Republicans will use their own widespread claims of voter fraud, and refusal to certify, to not only stall but ultimately refute election results.

A new report details how Elon Musk went from supporting Biden in 2020 to endorsing Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. The Washington Post reports that the world’s wealthiest man “began privately gathering support for Donald Trump’s second presidency long before” his July 13 endorsement.

An apparent initial inflection point in Musk’s drift away from Biden was the president’s decision not to invite Musk’s Tesla to a 2021 electric vehicle summit. The nonunion automaker Tesla was reportedly snubbed in part because the United Auto Workers union was attending the summit and Biden “wanted to burnish his pro-labor reputation.” At the time, the anti-labor billionaire he is, Musk accused Biden of being “controlled by the unions”—a charge he recently repeated on X.

Since then, Musk has become vocally pro-Trump. One month ago, Musk reportedly advocated for Trump at a Palm Beach congregation of billionaires and political strategists, largely based on anti-immigration sentiment. He expressed that “President Biden would allow millions of additional undocumented immigrants to cross America’s southern border,” creating “a demographic shift that could doom the Republican Party in future elections,” while Trump “would stop the crossings.”

This is consistent with Musk’s history of immigration alarmism. In The New Republic in March, Greg Sargent described how Musk espouses a version of the “great replacement theory” that claims “immigrants are being imported to replace native-born voters.”

The Washington Post report also detailed how Musk’s business interests have influenced his political shift. While under Biden, Musk’s businesses have faced investigations and recalls, sources told the Post that “Trump could ease Tesla’s regulatory path to delivering a fully autonomous personal vehicle … and dial back federal scrutiny of Tesla and X, as well as a National Labor Relations Board investigation into allegations of harassment at SpaceX.”

At the Palm Beach meeting, Musk reportedly acknowledged that the attendees may be hesitant to throw their support behind Trump—some of them “shook their heads and winced” at his pro-Trump statements—so he suggested “giving to an outside group instead.” In May, Musk helped found a super PAC to support Trump’s election bid. He has expressed his intention to donate to the PAC, which has raked in millions from tech giants and others in his circle.

The Summer Olympics are underway in Paris, and the right is getting triggered.

In an interview on the Fox Business Channel Monday morning, Representative Ryan Zinke was asked about new FBI confirmation that Donald Trump was actually struck by a bullet after a gunman in Pennsylvania tried to assassinate him earlier this month. Zinke, for some reason, decided to connect it to conservatives’ grievances over the Olympics.

“Trump is as much of a movement as it is a candidate, because America is not comfortable where we are. We’re not comfortable watching the Olympics. Disgusting display, dishonorable. We’re not comfortable with the woke. We’re not comfortable about getting beat up on foreign shores,” Zinke said.

Zinke was likely referring to Paris’s colorful display during the Olympic opening ceremony on Friday, which was decried by conservatives for its flamboyance and unabashed celebration of the LGBTQ+ community. In particular, right-wing religious figures and politicians claimed that one scene in the ceremony that featured drag queens, a transgender model, and a nearly naked blue man at a table of food was a disrespectful representation of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, The Last Supper, which depicts Jesus Christ’s last meal with his apostles.

Several conservatives criticized the ceremony and scene, including Speaker Mike Johnson, who posted on X (formerly Twitter) that it was “shocking and insulting to Christian people around the world.”

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called it an “anti-Christian” and “satanic, trans, and occult” opening ceremony.

Despite the right-wing meltdown, art experts pointed out that the scene was an homage to a different painting, The Feast of the Gods, based on Greek mythology. The blue man represented Dionysius, the Greek god of feasting and wine, said the ceremony’s creative director, Thomas Jolly, who flat-out denied any connection to The Last Supper.

“I think it was pretty clear. There’s Dionysus who arrives at the table.… Why is he there? Because he’s the god of feasting, of wine, and the father of Sequana, the goddess of the River Seine,” Jolly told a French TV station. 

It’s one thing to make a religious argument against the Olympic opening ceremony, but it was created and staged by the French and does not reflect U.S. politics, except in how conservatives have reacted to it. Most people have turned their attention to the Olympics’ actual sports now, but conservatives, in all of their weirdness today, still can’t stop obsessing over anything they think is an affront to them.

Former President Donald Trump has a serious problem with white men: They don’t want to vote for him. At least, not the way they did in 2016.

To plug the hole in Trump’s boat, the former president brought in Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, intending to “leave him in Pennsylvania” and secure blue-collar workers across the Rust Belt—namely, white men. Trump’s advisers believe that Vance could help keep white male voters on board, according to The Washington Post.

Trump’s problem with white guys is nothing new. In April, an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey found that the demographics that historically supported Trump have begun to shift and the groundswell of support from white male voters that Trump had experienced in 2016 was dissipating.

In 2016, Trump was able to fire up his white men without college degrees by focusing his campaign rhetoric on immigration and white grievance, or the idea that white people are the victims of discrimination, ideas that remain key among Republican voters, according to NPR.

But by 2020, it seemed that argument had already started to lose ground among white voters across the educational spectrum, who began to defect to Joe Biden’s camp. While Trump still came out on top in securing white male voters, the difference between their turnout in 2016 and 2020 was the nail in the coffin of his reelection bid.

Things only got worse from there. According to NPR, between 2020 and 2024, Biden saw a 24-point bump among white men with college degrees, a group that has historically backed Republicans.

Trump has begun to experience a slip in swing states, as well. Polling from late 2023 and early 2024 in Wisconsin, a key battleground state, showed that Trump’s net favorability rating among white men had dropped 22 points, from plus eight points to minus 14 points. Trump saw major slips with self-identified Republicans, rural men, and white men who did not attend college, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. These groups have a sizable overlap and make up a crucial part of Trump’s base.

In an effort to reclaim these voters, Trump tapped Vance to be his running mate, as someone who could theoretically appeal to both college-educated and non–college educated white men, touting his widely popularized white working-class roots alongside his degree from Yale Law School.

“You need a white guy to get the white guys we lost. The Hillbilly Elegy guy is the one to do it,” MAGA political operative Vish Burra told The Bulwark. “Trump needs Vance because he’s good on camera and he sounds right. He’s not one of these people you can dismiss as a MAGAloid or a barbarian.”

So far, it’s not totally clear that Vance is up for the task of white guy retrieval.

While there was plenty of initial excitement over Vance’s selection, a YouGov poll taken the week his nomination was announced found that Vance was viewed “very” favorably by only 18 percent of male respondents and “very” unfavorably by 28 percent. The results were identical among white respondents.

The same poll found that male respondents and white respondents were about evenly split in supporting versus disapproving of Trump picking Vance.

CNN analyst Harry Enten reported last week that Vance averaged a net favorability of negative six points across all polls, a number that was far lower than any other vice presidential nominee in history, including former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

At a Minnesota rally Saturday, Trump confused Representative Ilhan Omar for another Muslim woman of Congress, Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib.

“Ilhan Omar,” Trump began in a rambling speech. “She went to a speech when I was … first running.… This lunatic was in the audience, she started screaming. I said, ‘Who the hell is that?’ And it’s the same crazy person that I watch every night. She’s nuts.”

Omar responded to Trump’s remarks on X, writing, “Trump telling dangerous anti-Muslim lies is nothing new. But I have never attended one of his speeches. He is lying again or losing his memory.” Omar continued, “Trump should step aside as his criminal convictions and continued legal troubles have clearly taken a toll on the 78 year old conman.”

Shedding some light on the matter, The Independent reported that it was not Omar but Tlaib who interrupted Trump’s 2016 speech to the Detroit Economic Club prior to her election to the House.

Then a public interest attorney, Tlaib penned an op-ed explaining her decision at the time. “I told Trump that ‘our children deserve better’ and I asked him to provide a better example to our kids. I implored him to read the U.S. Constitution. And then I was grabbed by several security personnel who physically moved me to the exit while I continued to express my concerns,” Tlaib wrote.

When a video of the disruption resurfaced in 2019, Trump made similar comments about Tlaib, then getting her name right. But the former president has proven increasingly prone to mix-ups in recent months. Last week, he mistook Vice President Kamala Harris for Representative Nancy Pelosi. Earlier this year, he repeatedly confused Nikki Haley with Pelosi.

In the past, Trump has insisted he intentionally muddles his opponents’ names for rhetorical effect. This time, campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung admitted to Trump’s error, telling The Independent, with the poise and directness one might expect from Trump’s team, “It’s common to mistake the two deranged and radical individuals who both want open borders just like failed Border Czar Kamala Harris, are mentally unstable, and promote an anti-America agenda that seeks to shred the Constitution to pieces so they can burn it just like they do the American flag.”

Since Biden withdrew from the race, Trump is now the oldest candidate to run for president.

Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance has a response for all the critics who have been calling him weird for the past week.

On X (formerly Twitter) Sunday night, Vance posted a video with the caption “JD Vance is weird.” The innocuous video shows Vice President Kamala Harris telling CNN’s Chris Cuomo, “My pronouns are she, her, and hers” before a presidential town hall in 2019.

Last week, Harris directly called Vance “weird and creepy,” following the many terrible reports that have come out about him in recent days. The Ohio senator is now trying to paint Harris as weird for mentioning pronouns, but it’s not even a scandal and pales in comparison to all of the negative attention Vance has received since Trump chose him as his running mate. Much of the internet seemed to agree.

Last week, Vance started out with a campaign speech that fell flat after he failed to land a joke about Diet Mountain Dew. Old remarks from 2021 where he called Democrats “childless cat ladies” drew a backlash from celebrities and lawmakers alike, and a false rumor about a sexual act with a sofa continues to circulate online. He’s losing support from Trump’s allies, and even Anthony Scaramucci called him out.

Posting a five-year-old clip where Harris doesn’t even come off as weird (but Cuomo does), with transphobic undertones, isn’t going to do Vance any favors, particularly with younger voters. It’s another example of Vance failing to land a punch line, and at this point, Vance is quickly being seen as the worst vice presidential candidate ever.

Former President Donald Trump shared a slew of videos online attacking Vice President Kamala Harris, after a favorability poll aired on Fox News found she was leading him in a few key swing states. 

The new poll, conducted July 22–24 and released Sunday, found that Harris’s approval rating had surpassed Trump’s in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota.* 

Many online predicted that Trump would be incensed over the results. “The ketchup is going to hit the wall in Mar-a-Lago after this new Fox News poll,” remarked former Clinton White House aide Keith Boykin on X (formerly Twitter).

Within hours, Trump posted five separate videos on Truth Social of one of his longtime favorite Fox News hosts, Mark Levin, whom Rolling Stone once called a “bomb-throwing Trump sycophant,” attacking Harris.  

In one of the videos from Life, Liberty & Levin, Levin labeled Harris as a “rabid Marxist scholar,” specifically decrying her past statements about the need for equity—the idea that every person should be given access to the resources needed to be successful—so that, as Harris put it, every citizen could “end up in the same place.”

“‘So we all end up in the same place’? Doesn’t this sound like we’re all going to end up in a gulag?” Levin said. He called equity a “prescription for tyranny and totalitarianism,” ranting that it was “not the government’s job” to improve the quality of life of American citizens. 

In another video posted to Trump’s account, Levin criticized Harris for comparing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the Ku Klux Klan for causing fear and intimidation in immigrant communities. “The combination of stupidity and arrogance is on full display, right here,” said Levin. 

Levin continued to incorrectly call her the “border czar,” although she was never responsible for border security. 

Unfortunately for Trump, arguments like Levin’s don’t seem to be nearly as convincing to the rest of America. In just one week, Harris’s overall favorability jumped from 35 percent to 43 percent and her unfavorability fell from 46 percent to 42 percent, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted on Friday and Saturday.

*This article misstated Harris’s approval rating in the Fox News poll in Michigan. It was 47 percent, the same as Trump’s.

After the Supreme Court’s decision to grant the presidency near-total immunity on July 1, President Joe Biden now believes that the nation’s highest court is in dire need of reform.

In an op-ed for The Washington Post published Monday morning, Biden proposed a plan that would enforce term limits for the court’s justices, as well as a binding code of conduct. The term limits would have justices spend 18 years in active service on the Supreme Court, and the president could only appoint a justice every two years.

“The United States is the only major constitutional democracy that gives lifetime seats to its high court,” Biden wrote. “Term limits would help ensure that the court’s membership changes with some regularity. That would make timing for court nominations more predictable and less arbitrary.”

“It would reduce the chance that any single presidency radically alters the makeup of the court for generations to come,” Biden added.

Biden’s proposed code of conduct would require justices to “disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest.”

“Every other federal judge is bound by an enforceable code of conduct, and there is no reason for the Supreme Court to be exempt,” wrote Biden.

In the op-ed, Biden also called for a constitutional amendment called the “No One Is Above the Law Amendment,” which would clearly state that there is “no immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office.”

“I share our Founders’ belief that the president’s power is limited, not absolute. We are a nation of laws—not of kings or dictators,” Biden wrote.

Biden’s plans for the Supreme Court follow a series of scandals involving Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. In April 2023, a ProPublica investigation revealed Thomas received luxury vacations from billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow, which had not been disclosed by Thomas in accordance with mandatory financial disclosure rules. More revelations of undisclosed gifts followed in August of that year, including at least 38 vacations and 26 private jet flights given to Thomas from an array of right-wing billionaires. Thomas in 2003 also accepted a free trip to visit Vladimir Putin’s hometown in Russia.

Alito has had his own scandals involving political advocacy in the form of political flags flying outside of his home, and he was also implicated for receiving gifts from Crow and other right-wing billionaires. Monday’s op-ed may not be received well from the right, but it follows months of calls for reform from judicial observers as well as Democrats. While it may not be to the level of expanding the court, as some have called for, it is a strong proposal and likely to be factored in November’s elections.