Tag: Republican National Convention

Senator J.D. Vance, Echoing Donald Trump, Is Claiming He’s Alright With Abortion Pills

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On NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday morning, Ohio Senator and vice presidential hopeful J.D. Vance said he supports access to the abortion pill mifepristone—echoing what Donald Trump said just over a week ago on the debate stage.

“On the question of the abortion pill,” Vance began, “the Supreme Court made a decision in saying that the American people should have access to that medication, Donald Trump has supported that opinion, I support that opinion.”

He was referring to the court’s recent rejection of an attempt to limit access to mifepristone—which is safer than both penicillin and Viagra. Their ruling still left open the possibility for future attacks on the medication, which accounted for 63 percent of all abortions in 2023 and has been a lifeline for pregnant people in states with strict bans.

When asked by CNN debate moderator Dana Bash if he would block abortion medication, the former president said, “first of all, the Supreme Court just approved the abortion pill. And I agree with their decision to have done that, and I will not block it.” Earlier that week, Trump told a crowd of evangelicals, “You have to go with your heart. You have to also remember you have to get elected.”

With the Republican National Convention kicking off on July 15 in Milwaukee, those on the right seem to be trying to get on the same page about how they should talk about abortion—which about 1 in 8 voters have said is the most important issue driving their vote.

Vance’s response came after Meet the Press host Kristen Welker asked the senator about his position on Project 2025—a GOP playbook for how another four years of Trump should go. The project is organized by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and is made up of a coalition of other conservative organizations. Despite former Trump administration alums like housing secretary Ben Carson, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, and director of the Office of Management and Budget Russ Vought being involved in Project 2025, the former president has attempted to distance himself from the playbook, claiming he has “no idea who is behind it.”

“Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world,” Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” reads. “Now that the Supreme Court has acknowledged that the Constitution contains no right to an abortion,” it continues, “the FDA is ethically and legally obliged to revisit and withdraw its initial approval.”

“The Heritage Foundation does a lot of good work. It does a lot of things that I disagree with, a lot of things that I agree with,” Vance told Welker. “I guarantee there are things that Trump likes and dislikes about that 900-page document,” he continued, referring to the mandate. “But he is the person who will determine the agenda into the next administration.”

Vance said he hasn’t gotten the call from Trump asking him to officially run with him. “Most importantly, Kristen, we’re just trying to work to elect Donald Trump. Whoever the vice president is, he’s got a lot of good people he could choose from.”

Previously, Vance has been vehement in his anti-abortion stances.

In 2021, after the Texas legislature passed a near-total abortion ban, Vance heralded the move. “My view on this has been very clear,” he said, “it’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term” but “whether a child should be allowed to live even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to society.”

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Katie Herchenroeder

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July 7, 2024
RNC plans to soon consider declaring Trump the ‘presumptive 2024 nominee’

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COLUMBIA, S.C. — The Republican National Committee is expected to consider a resolution next week to declare Donald Trump the party’s “presumptive 2024 nominee,” even though only two states have voted and the former president has nowhere near the requisite number of delegates to clinch the mantle.

If approved, the measure would further solidify Trump’s control of the party and its operation at a time when former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley is still competing against Trump for the GOP nomination.

The measure, according to a draft obtained Thursday by The Associated Press, “declares President Trump as our presumptive 2024 nominee for the office of President of the United States and from this moment forward moves into full general election mode welcoming supporters of all candidates as valued members of Team Trump 2024.”

RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel already has signaled her approval. On Tuesday, after Haley finished second to Trump in New Hampshire, McDaniel said that while she felt the former ambassador had “run a great campaign,” Republicans “need to unite around our eventual nominee, which is going to be Donald Trump.”

News of the resolution, first reported by The Dispatch, comes as officials prepare to gather in Las Vegas next week for the RNC’s winter meeting, where it is expected to be discussed.

New Jersey Republican National Committeeman Bill Palatucci, a longtime supporter of former GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie, called the resolution “silly.”

“It’s insulting to millions of primary voters who wait for the opportunity to get involved in presidential politics every four years,” Palatucci said.

Regardless of what the RNC decides, the AP will not refer to any candidate as the “presumptive nominee” until he or she has captured the number of delegates needed to win a majority vote at the national party conventions this summer. The earliest that could happen is March.

But there are no party rules prohibiting the RNC from making such a move. If adopted, it would give the Republican Party a jump-start on planning a general election matchup with Democratic President Joe Biden, who has begun framing his reelection campaign as a 2020 rematch against Trump.

And there is precedent for the committee declaring a candidate the presumptive nominee before winning the 1,215 requisite delegates to clinch the nomination. In May 2016, then-RNC Chairman Reince Priebus declared Trump the presumptive nominee before he had the appropriate share of delegates wrapped up.

Despite losing both the Iowa and New Hampshire contests to Trump, Haley has argued that her performance — outlasting all the other Trump rivals — shows the strength of her candidacy.

Trump currently has 32 delegates to Haley’s 17. There is one delegate left to be assigned after the New Hampshire contest.

Neither the Haley campaign nor the Trump campaign returned messages seeking comment on Thursday.

During a rally Wednesday night in her home state of South Carolina, Haley — the former governor — noted that her campaign had brought in more than $1 million since her second-place finish in New Hampshire. Trump followed up with a remark that appeared aimed at intimidating her donors.

“Anybody that makes a ‘Contribution’ to Birdbrain, from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp,” Trump wrote, using the nickname he has crafted for Haley and the abbreviation for his “Make America Great Again” slogan. “We don’t want them, and will not accept them, because we Put America First, and ALWAYS WILL!”

Trump’s dismissal of any Haley donors had no effect on T.J. Petrizzo, a former top Capitol Hill staffer and now lobbyist who supports Haley.

“That’s something out of a ‘Godfather’ movie. Never betray the family? Come on,” he added. “You’ve got to play this through.”

Petrizzo said he understands that some Republicans may be ready to pivot to a head-to-head contest between Trump and Biden, but he notes that there is a lot of time left before a general election.

“I’ve heard a lot of elected officials in the Republican Party, including the RNC chair, say, ‘We need to rally around a candidate.’ That this is going to be our candidate. ‘It was chosen by Iowa and New Hampshire, so we must go ahead and rally around Trump,’” Petrizzo said. “Well, there’s 285 days until the election. There’s plenty of time on the clock.”

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Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa. Associated Press writer Zeke Miller in Washington contributed to this report.

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Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP

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January 25, 2024
Ex-Bush Strategist Predicts Exactly When Donald Trump Will Be Convicted

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Matthew Dowd, a Republican strategist for George W. Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign, on Tuesday predicted when former President Donald Trump will be convicted.

Dowd, talking to MSNBC’s Joy Reid, said he envisioned Trump ― who faces 91 charges across four criminal cases ― winning the GOP primaries in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina “and he’ll basically all but be the nominee.”

That is when, Dowd suggested, Republican 2024 front-runner Trump will be convicted — just before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in July 2024.

“So he’ll be the nominee, but be a convicted nominee in the midst of this, and then we’ll be headed to a general election with the nominee of a major political party convicted, at least in one court, if not in two different courts, in this time,” Dowd explained.

“A convicted felon running for president under the Republican Party,” added Dowd. “We have never in my life have ever seen a calendar that will unfold in that manner. But it also is going to be so weird while this is going on, Republican voters voting for him to be the nominee of the party as he’s convicted.”

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November 28, 2023
An anti-Trump video shared by the DeSantis campaign is ‘homophobic,’ says a conservative LGBT group

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NEW YORK (AP) — A prominent group that represents LGBT conservatives says a video shared by Ron DeSantis ′ presidential campaign that slams rival Donald Trump for his past support of gay and transgender people “ventured into homophobic territory.”

The “DeSantis War Room” Twitter account shared the video on Friday — the last day of June’s LGBTQ+ Pride Month — that features footage of Trump at the Republican National Convention in 2016 saying he would “do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens.” Trump had been pledging protection from terrorist attacks weeks after the shootings at the Pulse Nightclub, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history at that time.

The video also highlights “LGBTQ for Trump” T-shirts sold by the former president’s campaign and his past comments saying he would be comfortable with Caitlyn Jenner, the former Olympic decathlete who came out as a transgender woman in 2015, using any bathroom at Trump Tower and OK with transgender women competing one day in the Miss Universe pageant, which Trump owned at the time of those remarks.

South Carolina’s heavily Republican Upstate is a popular stop for presidential candidates trying to attract support for the first-in-the-South primary in 2024.

The two leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination have courted conservative women at the Moms for Liberty conference in Philadelphia .

A federal judge has rejected former President Donald Trump’s request that he dismiss a New York columnist’s defamation claims against him on grounds that he is entitled to absolute presidential immunity.

Three Florida men have been charged with making $22 million through illegal insider trading before the public announcement that an acquisition firm was going to take former President Donald Trump’s media company public.

The video then suddenly veers in a different direction, accompanied by dark, thumping music and images of DeSantis, the Florida governor who is trailing Trump by wide margins in the polls for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

It promotes headlines that DeSantis signed “the most extreme slate of anti-trans laws in modern history” and a “draconian anti-trans bathroom bill.” The images are spliced together with footage of muscular, shirtless men and several Hollywood actors, including Brad Pitt, seen wearing a leather mask from the movie “Troy.”

“To wrap up ‘Pride Month,’ let’s hear from the politician who did more than any other Republican to celebrate it,” the DeSantis campaign tweeted.

The video drew immediate criticism from prominent LGBTQ+ Republicans, including the Log Cabin Republicans, which bills itself as the nation’s “largest Republican organization dedicated to representing LGBT conservatives.”

“Today’s message from the DeSantis campaign War Room is divisive and desperate. Republicans and other commonsense conservatives know Ron Desantis has alienated swing-state and younger voters,” the group said in a tweet, adding that DeSantis’ “extreme rhetoric goes has just ventured into homophobic territory.”

The group said his “rhetoric will lose hard-fought gains in critical races across the nation. This old playbook has been tried in the past and has failed — repeatedly.” The post said DeSantis’ “naive policy positions are dangerous and politically stupid.”

Jenner accused DeSantis’ campaign of using “horribly divisive tactics!”

“DeSantis has hit a new low,” Jenner wrote on Twitter.

Representatives of the DeSantis campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment Saturday.

But Christina Pushaw, the campaign’s rapid response director, said in a tweet Friday night that, “Opposing the federal recognition of ‘Pride Month’ isn’t ‘homophobic.’ We wouldn’t support a month to celebrate straight people for sexual orientation, either… It’s unnecessary, divisive, pandering.“

The video comes as Republicans have been wading into increasingly hostile anti-LGBTQ+ territory, attacking Pride month celebrations, trying to ban displays of rainbow Pride flags and passing legislation to limit drag shows, along with broad attacks on transgender rights.

That rhetoric has seeped into the GOP presidential campaign, taking a prominent role that had been absent during recent past competitive primaries, including in 2016, when Trump, a New York reality TV star, generally presented himself as a supporter of LGBT rights.

DeSantis leaned in on anti-LGBTQ+ legislation as he prepared to jump into the 2024 White House race. He signed legislation banning classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in all grades, banned gender-affirming care for minors, targeted drag shows, restricted discussion of personal pronouns in schools and forced people to use bathrooms that align with the sex assigned at birth. DeSantis also went after President Joe Biden for prominently displaying the Pride flag at the White House last month.

Trump himself pledged in a speech Friday that if elected, he would sign executive orders on his first day in office to cut federal money for any school pushing “transgender insanity” and to instruct federal agencies “to cease the promotion of sex or gender transition at any age.” Hospitals and health care providers offering gender-affirming care for minors should be deemed in violation of federal health and safety standards and lose federal funding, he said.

Both Trump and DeSantis have also railed against transgender women participating in women’s sports and have referred to gender-affirming care for minors as “mutilation.”

At Trump’s rally in Pickens, South Carolina, on Saturday, the crowd booed when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., referenced to Pride month.

“The rainbow belongs to God,” she said.

While such rhetoric appeals to the party’s conservative base, it risks alienating the more moderate and swing voters who generally decide the outcomes of general elections.

The video, originally posted by the pro-DeSantis “@ProudElephantUS” account, was shared hours after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled that a Christian graphic artist who wants to design wedding websites can refuse to work with same-sex couples.

The decision marked a major defeat for gay rights, with one of the court’s liberal justices writing in a dissent that the decision’s effect would be to “mark gays and lesbians for second-class status.”

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July 2, 2023
Tennessee governor signs bill to cut Nashville council in half

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Republican lawmakers and Tennessee’s governor signed off Thursday on cutting Democratic-leaning Nashville’s metro council in half, a move that follows the council’s rejection of efforts to host the 2024 Republican National Convention in Music City.

Gov. Bill Lee signed the proposal into law a little less than an hour after the Senate voted to shrink Nashville’s 40-member council. The Republican issue no statement or warning, but he had previously said that generally he supported council sizes smaller than Nashville’s.

The move drew an immediate outcry and is expected to spark legal challenges. Nashville Mayor John Cooper’s administration and others say the change will throw this year’s council elections into chaos, spurring the need to redraw districts after more than 40 candidates already launched campaigns.

“This attack on the Constitutional rights of Metro and the people who live here is very dangerous. It serves the interests of no one,” said Wally Dietz, Nashville’s law director.

“We hope cooler heads will prevail, but in the event they do not, we are prepared to vigorously defend the constitutional rights of our city and its residents,” he said in a statement.

The law, which only applies to city or city-county governments, would cut Nashville’s combined council to 20 people.

“Conventional wisdom for the past four decades has been that smaller group sizes tend to make better decisions and this is the largest council that we see,” said Republican Sen. Adam Lowe of Calhoun. “…There’s a reason why we’re judged by 12 of our peers in a jury and there’s a reason, I think, why Christ walked with 12 of his disciples.”

Critics in Nashville have decried the efforts to dictate the size of its elected government while the city continues to grow and pull in more visitors, residents and revenue to the state. Others have argued that the change will also erode representation of minority communities and hamper council members’ ability to address constituent needs.

The statute requires Nashville to craft new council districts by May 1 — a deadline Nashville’s legal officials say is unreasonable.

Nashville has operated as a combined city-county government under a 40-member council since 1963, when leaders were wrestling with consolidating the city with the surrounding county, and others were working to ensure Black leaders maintain a strong representation in the Southern city.

To date, a quarter of the council’s seats are held by Black members, half are held by women and five identify as LGBTQ.

“This will set us back decades,” said Democratic Sen Charlane Oliver, a Black lawmaker from Nashville. “This will disproportionately impact the Black representation, the minority representation and dilute — not just dilute — it will steal and silence our voices.”

Republican lawmakers overwhelmingly voted for the proposal. But on Thursday, GOP Sen. Frank Niceley warned that a smaller council could result in fewer Republicans getting elected in Nashville because of larger districts, thereby strengthening the Democratic political hold inside the city and developing “more powerful Democrats” to run for offices.

Niceley also warned that the mayor and lobbyists will be able to work more efficiently with a smaller council. Niceley didn’t vote on the bill.

“I don’t know why we’re doing this,” said Niceley, a Strawberry Plains lawmaker.

The law says that if a metro government can’t make the changes for the next election, current members’ terms are extended a year, and the next term will shrink to three years, then return to four for subsequent councils. City officials have said the scheme violates the state constitution.

Republicans killed a Democratic amendment that would have set the same limit for counties, some featuring more than 20 board members. They also rejected an amendment to leave the change up to voters, and another that would have delayed the change until after this year’s election.

The new law is one of several proposals the Republican-dominant Legislature has proposed this year after Nashville leaders spiked a proposal to host the Republican National Committee last year.

A separate bill would give the state control of the governing board for the city’s airport, stadiums and other landmarks, while another would remove Nashville’s ability to charge the tax that funds its convention center. Republicans have also a bill that would block cities from using public funds for reimbursing employees who travel to get an abortion.

The bills align with Tennessee Republicans push to limit Nashville and other cities over the years. This has included curtailing Nashville and other cities’ ability to ban short-term rentals, including Airbnb, and barring cities from decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana — which Nashville and Memphis had moved to do.

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March 9, 2023
Republicans set opening presidential debate for August

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The Republican National Committee has decided that the opening Republican presidential debate of the 2024 election season will take place in Milwaukee this August

BySTEVE PEOPLES AP National Political Writer

February 23, 2023, 6:02 PM

NEW YORK — The opening Republican presidential debate of the 2024 election season will take place in Milwaukee this August, the Republican National Committee decided Thursday.

The rough time and location were the only details finalized as a small group of RNC members met behind closed doors in Washington this week to begin the complicated task of coordinating logistics for what is likely to be a crowded and messy primary season. In the coming weeks, the group plans to finalize a broader set of criteria for participation, including the requirement that each candidate on stage must pledge to support the Republican Party’s eventual nominee.

In selecting Milwaukee, the RNC is following its recent tradition of hosting its inaugural presidential debate in the city playing host to the national convention the following year.

“At this time, no other debates have been sanctioned, nor has the final criteria for the first debate been decided,” GOP Chair Ronna McDaniel wrote in a message to RNC members Thursday. “We have a long way to go, but I am confident we will be able to showcase our eventual nominee in a world class fashion.”

Three high-profile Republicans have already launched White House bids, but as many as a dozen are ultimately expected to enter the 2024 presidential contest. Already, there are sharp divisions over the future of the party and former President Donald Trump’s divisive politics.

The committee is considering between 10 and 12 debates between August and its national convention in the summer of 2024.

Republican officials are likely to adopt new criteria for participation, including a new donor threshold to demonstrate broad support among the party’s grassroots in addition to a polling threshold of 1% or 2%.

Committee officials also met privately this week with more than a dozen media companies to determine the network partners. They include major television networks like CNN, MSNBC and Fox and lower-profile conservative favorites like Newsmax.

“The committee will continue its work and will release updates as they become available,” McDaniel wrote.

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February 23, 2023
Kansas Republicans pick election conspiracy promoter Mike Brown as their new leader

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Republicans in Kansas narrowly picked an activist who has promoted unfounded election conspiracies and promised a shakeup to lead the state Republican Party for the next two years, following weeks of infighting that mirrors the acrimony in the party across the U.S.

Within 30 minutes of the change in the Kansas Republican Party’s leadership, its state committee reviewed a resolution demanding that the U.S. House impeach President Joe Biden for “tyranny” over comments he and his aides made in the summer of 2021 decrying misinformation about coronavirus vaccines spreading within the GOP. The committee tabled the resolution until its next meeting.

The Kansas state committee elected Mike Brown, who has long been active in the GOP in the Kansas City area, as its new chair through the 2024 elections. The vote came three months after Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly narrowly won reelection and the only Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation, U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, won another term handily in her Kansas City-area district.

The Kansas party’s retiring chair, Mike Kuckelman, and its two other Republican National Committee members supported RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel when she won reelection last month. But Brown had called on McDaniel to resign in December, and he said Saturday that the national GOP is seeing an internal “uprising” from members still upset over COVID-19 pandemic restrictions.

“The RNC needs to be paying very close attention to that,” Brown said. “It is the future of our party.”

Last year, Brown ran unsuccessfully for the GOP nomination for Kansas secretary of state. Both he and his opponent, Helen Van Etten, a longtime Topeka activist and former RNC member, promised to revive the Kansas party. But Brown asked fellow Republicans whether they were happy with the results of the past two governor’s races, won by Kelly, and Davids’ election victories.

The vote — with Brown prevailing 90-88 — occurred against the backdrop of the GOP’s unexpectedly poor showing in the 2022 midterms, when it won fewer than expected U.S. House seats and failed to recapture a U.S. Senate majority.

In Kansas, the GOP holds a voter registration advantage, which means that Democrats win big races by attracting votes from moderate Republicans and independent voters, while Republicans generally prevail when the party is unified.

“We need to have more unity,” state Rep. Patrick Penn, a Wichita Republican, told fellow GOP committee members. “That’s the crux of it.”

Some Republicans framed the contest between Brown and Van Etten as a fight between an anti-establishment wing and the establishment.

The infighting ahead of Saturday’s vote was especially intense in Johnson County, in the Kansas City area, the state’s most populous county and home for both Brown and retiring State Chair Mike Kuckelman. The county’s affluent suburbs once were GOP strongholds, but since 2018, they’ve become conspicuously more Democratic — and have been crucial to Kelly’s and Davids’ victories.

The Johnson County GOP’s new chair, a Brown ally concerned about the county’s “purple creep,” told GOP state committee members that Kuckelman had been “absolutely abhorrent” in his treatment of Brown. Kuckelman fired back with several emails, including one accusing Brown of being soft in opposing abortion and supporting gun rights.

With the Republican National Committee, McDaniel overcame opposition from the ultra-Make America Great Again wing of the party despite having been picked for the job in 2016 by former President Donald Trump.

In Michigan, two statewide GOP candidates who denied President Joe Biden’s election victory in 2020 were seeking party offices ahead of a convention next weekend. In Nebraska last year, Republicans who support Trump fired the state chair during a tumultuous convention following a Trump-backed candidate’s loss in the GOP primary for governor.

Brown has promoted unfounded theories that Trump’s supporters have used to bolster the former president’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. He is a construction contractor who served on the Johnson County Commission before losing his seat in 2020.

Brown lost the GOP primary for secretary of state to Republican incumbent Scott Schwab, who has vouched for the integrity of Kansas elections.

Van Etten, a retired audiologist, served on the RNC from 2008 to 2020. She also is a former member of the state board that oversees Kansas’ higher education system.

She promised state committee members a “very aggressive” program of building local party organizations: “We’re ready and willing to unite the party.”

One supporter, conservative Kansas City-area economist, researcher and consultant Michael Austin, said: “We need experience. We need connections.”

During the state committee meeting, Kuckelman defended current party leaders’ record, noting that the party has no debt.

Kim Borchers, a longtime Topeka activist who serves on the RNC, defended McDaniel and pushed back pointedly on complaints against the party establishment. She had the state committee members with more than five years’ of experience stand.

“Welcome to the establishment,” she said. “I call that commitment.”

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February 11, 2023
Jan. 6 committee transcripts show link between Trump and Nevada fake electors

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New transcripts of closed-door testimony to the Jan. 6 House committee show Donald Trump and his allies had a direct hand in the Nevada Republican Party’s scheme to send a phony electoral certificate to Congress in 2020 in a last-ditch attempt to keep the former president in power.

The documents made public Wednesday evening included interviews with state party leader Michael McDonald and Republican National Committeeman Jim DeGraffenreid in February. Both men served as fake electors in Carson City on Dec. 14, 2020.

That day, six Nevada GOP members signed certificates falsely stating that Trump won Nevada in 2020 and sent them to Congress and the National Archives, where they were ultimately ignored. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is digging into the role that these fake electors in key battleground states had in Trump’s attempt to cling to power after his 2020 defeat.

McDonald and DeGraffenreid invoked Fifth Amendment protection hundreds of times in their separate interviews with the Jan. 6 committee, refusing to answer questions about their involvement and the extent to which Trump’s top allies had helped in orchestrating the plot.

But the transcripts still provide a view into the Trump team’s coordinated efforts in Nevada to overturn the results of the election — efforts that included direct communication between McDonald and the president himself.

According to the transcript of McDonald’s interview, on Nov. 4, 2020, the day after the election, McDonald said in a text exchange, “I have been on the phone this morning with the President (Trump), Eric Trump, Mark Meadows, and Rudy Giuliani. There is a major plan.”

“They want full attack mode,” McDonald later wrote in another text message describing that call. “We’re gonna have a war room meeting in about an hour.”

Both McDonald and DeGraffenreid turned over their communications to the Jan. 6 committee related to the fake elector scheme. The FBI also seized McDonald’s cellphone in June as part of an investigation into the scheme.

Those documents, detailed at length in the transcripts, included text messages, emails and internal memorandums distributed by the national GOP arm; handwritten charts, templates for press releases and the phony certificate itself; and talking points “explaining the rationale for the electors.”

The planning was extensive, the transcripts show, and began as early as four days before the election, when state party officials began discussing whether Nevada’s Republican secretary of state, Barbara Cegavske, would sign off on the alternate slate of electors.

DeGraffenreid, in a text conversation with party officials, said Cegavske “might do a lot of things, but sending a slate of Republican electors without them being clearly the winners of the popular vote is not one of them.”

Cegavske ultimately certified President Joe Biden’s victory in Nevada, defending the results as reliable and accurate despite attacks from Trump and others within her own party, which led the Nevada Republican Party to censure her. She later conducted an investigation that found no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud throughout the state.

Meanwhile, the day before the slate of fake electors met, the transcripts show McDonald grew increasingly frustrated with the RNC’s direction over how to conduct the certificate signing. It appeared that he had gone back and forth with the RNC about logistics of the ceremony: the location, how they would publicize it and what they would say in their speeches.

“RNC essentially put us in a box on what we can say, but doesn’t sound too bad,” Shawn Meehan, one of the fake electors, said in a text to DeGraffenreid.

Meehan also told DeGraffenreid that McDonald wanted a smaller group that would plan the final details over breakfast, and that he is “stressing on the optics.” It was visible to several of the fake electors — that same day, another fake elector had texted DeGraffenreid that McDonald was upset with “mixed messages and direction on publicity for tomorrow.”

“He’s very concerned RNC will cut cord if it looks bad and steal credit if we do well,” Meehan messaged.

“I know,” DeGraffenreid responded. “He’s concerned that we look like foolish crybabies.”

Ultimately, the Nevada Republican Party would press forward, and after nearly two months of planning, McDonald, DeGraffenreid and the other fake electors gathered outside the Capitol building in Carson City for a ceremony.

“History made today in Carson City, Nevada,” the state party would write on social media after the ceremony, “as @McDonaldNV leads our electors in casting Nevada’s 6 electoral votes for the winner of Nevada, @realDonaldTrump and @Mike_Pence!”

McDonald did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday evening. A lawyer for DeGraffenreid said he declined to comment.

The nine-member committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot will dissolve when Republicans take over the House next month. The committee on Thursday released its full 800-plus page report of its 18-month investigation, which they hope will lead to criminal charges against Trump and his key allies.

Assault On The U.S. Capitol

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December 23, 2022