democracynow--2020-10-19--Jeremy Scahill: Trump Has Incited White Supremacists & Emboldened Police to Act Outside the Law

This is a rush transcript .
Copy may not be in its final form .
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now !
, democracynow.org , The Quarantine Report .
I ’ m Amy Goodman .
President Trump campaigned in Michigan , Wisconsin and Nevada over the weekend as he scrambles to pick up more support in critical swing states in these last two closing weeks of the 2020 race .
Speaking in Muskegon , Michigan , Saturday , President Trump demanded Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer reopen the state .
The crowd soon started chanting “ Lock her up.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ them all up.
” AMY GOODMAN : Trump ’ s remarks came just less than two weeks after the FBI and authorities in Michigan arrested 13 men with ties to armed right-wing groups , including six men who allegedly plotted to kidnap Michigan Governor Whitmer and take her hostage .
A seventh man was arrested in connection with the kidnapping plot and charged on Thursday with suspicion of material support in an act of terrorism .
Over the weekend , federal prosecutors released videos of training exercises carried out by the men accused @ @ @ @ @ @ @ videos show heavily armed men in tactical gear firing assault rifles and Taser weapons .
In one video , one of the arrested men talks about killing , quote , “ government thugs.
” AMY GOODMAN : On Sunday , Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer appeared on Meet the Press and criticized President Trump .
AMY GOODMAN : FBI Director Christopher Wray recently warned Congress that “ racially motivated violent extremism ” is the primary threat of domestic terrorism .
President Trump ’ s call to “ lock them all up ” is part @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for the arrests of his political opponents and critics , including the Democratic presidential nominee , former President Obama — who ’ s going on the road to campaign for Biden on Wednesday — and 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton .
As the presidential campaign enters its final two weeks , we ’ re spending the hour looking at these recent developments and the past four years of the Trump presidency , from his crackdown on immigration to his use of racialized fearmongering and incitement to run the country .
We ’ re @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The Intercept .
His podcast Intercepted just released the fourth chapter in a seven-part audio documentary series titled American Mythology : The Presidency of Donald Trump .
Jeremy Scahill is the author of several books , including Blackwater : The Rise of the World ’ s Most Powerful Mercenary Army and Dirty Wars : The World Is a Battlefield , also the name of his film .
Jeremy , welcome back to Democracy Now !
It ’ s great to have you with us .
We want to talk about a number of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this really comprehensive documentary series you ’ re doing , looking at the past four years .
But let ’ s start with what happened this weekend .
Let ’ s start with , once again , President Trump this time not saying “ liberate Michigan , ” but joining in a chant as the people around him call “ Lock he up , ” talking about Governor Whitmer , who was just the target of a plot to be kidnapped and perhaps lynched , brought to Wisconsin , where you grew up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what ’ s taking place right now .
JEREMY SCAHILL : You know , Amy , I think that what ’ s become very , very clear over these four years is that Donald Trump is not an aberration of U.S. history or some anomaly , but he is a very overt representation of many of the absolute most violent , destructive , racist , xenophobic trends in U.S. history .
Now , we can talk about the way that he has empowered white nationalists , white supremacists , encouraged their violence , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ important to set that in a broader context of Trump being essentially a Trojan horse for the most extreme policies of the Republican Party .
The Republican Party is one of the most dangerous political bodies on the face of the Earth today .
And so , while it is important to focus on the activities of individual militias , the plot against Governor Whitmer , the use of vehicles to try to murder protesters , we can ’ t do it at the expense of recognizing that these are sort of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ long-term Republican agenda that has at its center white supremacy , anti-worker policies , anti-women policies and , certainly with Mike Pence in the White House , a right-wing Christian supremacist theocratic ideology that ’ s manifesting itself right now in the court system .
So , what we ’ re seeing is Trump using a tactic that was used against Black people in this country for centuries , where you have these unofficial forces that are doing the lynching and then those in power are saying , “ Oh , well , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ You know , we ’ re going to rustle up those good old boys and put them on trial ” — if they would even do that .
The reality is that there is this nexus between the white supremacist unofficial forces , the shock troops of this administration , and then Trump cultivating so-called law enforcement as a political class and sort of appealing to the police nationwide to also come out front and center as his racialized shock troops .
So , all of this can be traced to the throughlines @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , as well as the broader racist , xenophobic culture in the United States .
That ’ s what we ’ re seeing right now , is a manifestation of what Donald Trump has now made clear , that these strands of American history are alive , well and very , very deadly .
AMY GOODMAN : Last week , President Trump appeared to admit that he ordered U.S .
Marshals to carry out the extrajudicial killing of the anti-fascist activist Michael Reinoehl in Washington state on September 3rd .
He had been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a protest in Portland .
This is Trump .
AMY GOODMAN : Can you respond to this , Jeremy ?
JEREMY SCAHILL : Look , there ’ s a word for what it appears happened there , and that ’ s “ assassination.
” And it appears to be certainly the way that Trump is bragging about it .
Now , we don ’ t have all of the details , but Donald Trump is speaking about this as a political assassination of an American citizen on U.S. soil .
And it appears @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dramatically misled the public into believing that there was some epic shootout that took place .
It sounds , based on the president ’ s own description , that this was an assassination .
And I think as we all watch in horror at the kidnappings that have taken place of protesters , at the murder of unarmed Black people in this country , at the ramming with vehicles of police , that , again , we are a nation that has long assassinated its own people when they become politically inconvenient or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ getting too uppity .
I recall the murder , the assassination of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton in Chicago .
We ’ ve had civil rights leaders and presidential candidates assassinated .
We ’ ve had a president assassinated in this country .
And I think that this tendency to sort of act as though Trump has crossed the Rubicon is ahistorical .
Trump represents a dark part of American history that we have never fully reckoned with .
And we have both parties in this country have continued to empower Donald @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of their constant harping on Trump being the worst president in history , this great threat to democracy as we know it and the future of the republic , should be asked : Why have you consistently voted to give this dangerous tyrant , as you characterize him , sweeping surveillance powers , the ability to spy on American citizens ?
You think that these votes that the Democrats are backing in the Congress that have to do with surveillance and paramilitarization of law enforcement , that these are somehow disconnected from the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ openly celebrating the assassination of an American citizen on U.S. soil ?
The powers of the executive branch have been so radically broadened , beginning really in the Ford administration , but particularly after 9/11 .
And when we had a constitutional law professor as president for eight years , instead of moving to radically rein in the powers of the presidency , what we saw was Obama utilize them himself .
Now , Obama wasn ’ t running around whacking U.S. citizens on American soil , but he did assassinate citizens overseas @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was never accused of any crime of terrorism , who Obama had killed in a drone strike .
So , you know , the dangers of Donald Trump — I ’ m not trying to minimize anything about Donald Trump .
I think this is a dangerous , dangerous despot .
But if we refuse to recognize how we got Donald Trump and the historical context of what he ’ s doing as president and that it is rooted in American history , if we don ’ t reckon with that , then @ @ @ @ @ @ @ just one step .
We still have this rotten system that can be exploited by another Trump , or even by a Democrat who claims to be hoping and changing , left and right .
AMY GOODMAN : Jeremy , back on the issue of the white supremacists , the Michigan attorney general also warned , when people talked about them being kind of like Keystone Cops-esque and we see the video of them practicing shooting , tasering , the terrifying idea that they would not stop at kidnapping her , but , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , lynching her — the Michigan attorney general said this is just the tip of the iceberg .
You have President Trump ’ s own FBI , even if Christopher Wray is not exactly his ally , and the Department of Homeland Security , Chad Wolf , coming out with this report saying that white supremacist violent extremists are the number one domestic terrorist threat in this country .
Far more than international threats to the United States are white supremacist , right-wing extremists .
JEREMY SCAHILL : You know , I mean @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , if they ’ ve even looked at that information , have taken that and said , “ OK , this is a good thing .
Let ’ s continue to encourage them.
” Donald Trump is doing what authoritarians throughout history have done .
When they ’ re asked to condemn the violence of unofficial forces , they will grudgingly do that , while at the same time saying things like , you know , “ Stand down and stand by ” — in other words , “ Wait and see.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you can not separate these white supremacist militias ’ alleged plots to kidnap Democratic governors in this country from the fact that Trump has cultivated law enforcement as a political class , and he has openly and repeatedly encouraged them to act extrajudicially , to beat people harder , to not respect their rights .
Trump threatened to send in the U.S. military at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests .
Trump encouraged mayors and governors to beat them harder in the streets .
We have a paramilitarized state of law @ @ @ @ @ @ @ acts as a white supremacist gang , particularly when facing down African Americans or Brown people or people of color .
You know , that is something that I fear , that if we focus too much on the threat of white supremacist private actors at the expense of recognizing how the taxpayer-funded official forces also serve that same function , and with the full backing of the White House , that we ’ re sort of being misdirected here .
This is a systemic problem .
And the Proud Boys of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the world and the militias of the world , they essentially are auxiliary forces for official government forces that often function as effective white supremacist militias , particularly in Black communities .
AMY GOODMAN : And then you have , for example , Kenosha , where they come together , where you have these white vigilantes come in , saying they are protecting private property , and the authorities there , the law enforcement authorities , are supporting them .
And then you have — AMY GOODMAN : — Kyle Rittenhouse — giving @ @ @ @ @ @ @ support you here.
” And then you have this 17-year-old , Kyle Rittenhouse , who opened fire and kills two Black Lives Matter activists .
President Trump defends him .
AMY GOODMAN : And he is not killed by federal authorities , as we saw happen in Oregon .
JEREMY SCAHILL : No .
And , in fact , at these Black Lives Matter protests , when these vile so-called counterprotesters show up , you know , we ’ ve seen people fire bow and arrow — you know , arrows from crossbows @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the use of vehicles as a lethal or semi-lethal weapon against protesters — more than a hundred cases of individuals using their cars .
And I believe , at last count , eight of them were police officers that actually had used vehicles to ram into protesters .
But Donald Trump , on a domestic level , is saying that someone like Kyle Rittenhouse is sort of — you know , he ’ s misunderstood , and he ’ s essentially on the right side of history .
And he does the same @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has pardoned outright war criminals who have committed massacres against civilians abroad .
And at home , he has , at his rallies , offered to pay the legal fees of people that beat up protesters .
He has encouraged the police to act with more brutality .
He has consistently staked out a position that says that if you kill in the name of protecting the real America — white America — then we ’ re going to be there for you , we ’ ve got your back .
And that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , overt manifestation of a white supremacy that ’ s at the core of this country , that has never been fully addressed .
And it ’ s why we ’ re seeing someone like Trump able to pull this off .
We do not have a true opposition in the form of the Democratic Party on a legislative level .
Quite the contrary , they ’ ve consistently supported some of Trump ’ s most dangerous tools available to the executive branch .

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
President Trump campaigned in Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada over the weekend as he scrambles to pick up more support in critical swing states in these last two closing weeks of the 2020 race. Speaking in Muskegon, Michigan, Saturday, President Trump demanded Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer reopen the state. The crowd soon started chanting “Lock her up.” Trump responded by saying, “Lock them all up.”
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: You got to get your governor to open up your state, OK? And get your schools open. Get your schools open. The schools have to be open, right?
CROWD: Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Lock her — lock ’em all up.
CROWD: Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!
AMY GOODMAN: Trump’s remarks came just less than two weeks after the FBI and authorities in Michigan arrested 13 men with ties to armed right-wing groups, including six men who allegedly plotted to kidnap Michigan Governor Whitmer and take her hostage. A seventh man was arrested in connection with the kidnapping plot and charged on Thursday with suspicion of material support in an act of terrorism. Over the weekend, federal prosecutors released videos of training exercises carried out by the men accused of plotting to kidnap Whitmer. The videos show heavily armed men in tactical gear firing assault rifles and Taser weapons. In one video, one of the arrested men talks about killing, quote, “government thugs.”
BRANDON CASERTA: If this whole thing, you know, starts to happen, I’m telling you what, dude, I’m taking out as many as those mother[bleep] as I can. Every single one, dude. Every single one.
AMY GOODMAN: On Sunday, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer appeared on Meet the Press and criticized President Trump.
GOV. GRETCHEN WHITMER: You know, it’s incredibly disturbing that the president of the United States, 10 days after a plot to kidnap, put me on trial and execute me — 10 days after that was uncovered, the president is at it again and inspiring and incentivizing and inciting this kind of domestic terrorism. It is wrong. It’s got to end. It is dangerous, not just for me and my family, but for public servants everywhere who are doing their jobs and trying to protect their fellow Americans.
AMY GOODMAN: FBI Director Christopher Wray recently warned Congress that “racially motivated violent extremism” is the primary threat of domestic terrorism.
President Trump’s call to “lock them all up” is part of a pattern where he openly calls for the arrests of his political opponents and critics, including the Democratic presidential nominee, former President Obama — who’s going on the road to campaign for Biden on Wednesday — and 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
As the presidential campaign enters its final two weeks, we’re spending the hour looking at these recent developments and the past four years of the Trump presidency, from his crackdown on immigration to his use of racialized fearmongering and incitement to run the country.
We’re joined by investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept. His podcast Intercepted just released the fourth chapter in a seven-part audio documentary series titled American Mythology: The Presidency of Donald Trump. Jeremy Scahill is the author of several books, including Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army and Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, also the name of his film.
Jeremy, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. We want to talk about a number of the issues you’re covering in this really comprehensive documentary series you’re doing, looking at the past four years. But let’s start with what happened this weekend. Let’s start with, once again, President Trump this time not saying “liberate Michigan,” but joining in a chant as the people around him call “Lock he up,” talking about Governor Whitmer, who was just the target of a plot to be kidnapped and perhaps lynched, brought to Wisconsin, where you grew up, to be tried. Respond to what’s taking place right now.
JEREMY SCAHILL: You know, Amy, I think that what’s become very, very clear over these four years is that Donald Trump is not an aberration of U.S. history or some anomaly, but he is a very overt representation of many of the absolute most violent, destructive, racist, xenophobic trends in U.S. history.
Now, we can talk about the way that he has empowered white nationalists, white supremacists, encouraged their violence, but I think that it’s important to set that in a broader context of Trump being essentially a Trojan horse for the most extreme policies of the Republican Party. The Republican Party is one of the most dangerous political bodies on the face of the Earth today. And so, while it is important to focus on the activities of individual militias, the plot against Governor Whitmer, the use of vehicles to try to murder protesters, we can’t do it at the expense of recognizing that these are sort of the unofficial shock troops of what is a long-term Republican agenda that has at its center white supremacy, anti-worker policies, anti-women policies and, certainly with Mike Pence in the White House, a right-wing Christian supremacist theocratic ideology that’s manifesting itself right now in the court system.
So, what we’re seeing is Trump using a tactic that was used against Black people in this country for centuries, where you have these unofficial forces that are doing the lynching and then those in power are saying, “Oh, well, we didn’t do that. You know, we’re going to rustle up those good old boys and put them on trial” — if they would even do that. The reality is that there is this nexus between the white supremacist unofficial forces, the shock troops of this administration, and then Trump cultivating so-called law enforcement as a political class and sort of appealing to the police nationwide to also come out front and center as his racialized shock troops.
So, all of this can be traced to the throughlines of white supremacist politics in official Washington, as well as the broader racist, xenophobic culture in the United States. That’s what we’re seeing right now, is a manifestation of what Donald Trump has now made clear, that these strands of American history are alive, well and very, very deadly.
AMY GOODMAN: Last week, President Trump appeared to admit that he ordered U.S. Marshals to carry out the extrajudicial killing of the anti-fascist activist Michael Reinoehl in Washington state on September 3rd. He had been accused of killing a far-right activist during a protest in Portland. This is Trump.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We sent in the U.S. Marshals. Took 15 minutes. It was over. Fifteen minutes, it was over. We got him. They knew who he was. They didn’t want to arrest him. And 15 minutes, that ended.
JEREMY SCAHILL: You know, Amy —
AMY GOODMAN: Can you respond to this, Jeremy?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Look, there’s a word for what it appears happened there, and that’s “assassination.” And it appears to be certainly the way that Trump is bragging about it. Now, we don’t have all of the details, but Donald Trump is speaking about this as a political assassination of an American citizen on U.S. soil. And it appears that they have lied or at least dramatically misled the public into believing that there was some epic shootout that took place. It sounds, based on the president’s own description, that this was an assassination.
And I think as we all watch in horror at the kidnappings that have taken place of protesters, at the murder of unarmed Black people in this country, at the ramming with vehicles of police, that, again, we are a nation that has long assassinated its own people when they become politically inconvenient or when we consider them to be less-than-humans getting too uppity. I recall the murder, the assassination of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton in Chicago. We’ve had civil rights leaders and presidential candidates assassinated. We’ve had a president assassinated in this country. And I think that this tendency to sort of act as though Trump has crossed the Rubicon is ahistorical. Trump represents a dark part of American history that we have never fully reckoned with.
And we have both parties in this country have continued to empower Donald Trump. The Democrats, for all of their constant harping on Trump being the worst president in history, this great threat to democracy as we know it and the future of the republic, should be asked: Why have you consistently voted to give this dangerous tyrant, as you characterize him, sweeping surveillance powers, the ability to spy on American citizens? You think that these votes that the Democrats are backing in the Congress that have to do with surveillance and paramilitarization of law enforcement, that these are somehow disconnected from the fact that we now have a president openly celebrating the assassination of an American citizen on U.S. soil?
The powers of the executive branch have been so radically broadened, beginning really in the Ford administration, but particularly after 9/11. And when we had a constitutional law professor as president for eight years, instead of moving to radically rein in the powers of the presidency, what we saw was Obama utilize them himself. Now, Obama wasn’t running around whacking U.S. citizens on American soil, but he did assassinate citizens overseas, including a 16-year-old American citizen who was never accused of any crime of terrorism, who Obama had killed in a drone strike.
So, you know, the dangers of Donald Trump — I’m not trying to minimize anything about Donald Trump. I think this is a dangerous, dangerous despot. But if we refuse to recognize how we got Donald Trump and the historical context of what he’s doing as president and that it is rooted in American history, if we don’t reckon with that, then voting Donald Trump out of office is just one step. We still have this rotten system that can be exploited by another Trump, or even by a Democrat who claims to be hoping and changing, left and right.
AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, back on the issue of the white supremacists, the Michigan attorney general also warned, when people talked about them being kind of like Keystone Cops-esque and we see the video of them practicing shooting, tasering, the terrifying idea that they would not stop at kidnapping her, but, as they had promised in the past, lynching her — the Michigan attorney general said this is just the tip of the iceberg. You have President Trump’s own FBI, even if Christopher Wray is not exactly his ally, and the Department of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, coming out with this report saying that white supremacist violent extremists are the number one domestic terrorist threat in this country. Far more than international threats to the United States are white supremacist, right-wing extremists.
JEREMY SCAHILL: You know, I mean, and clearly, the Trump administration, if they’ve even looked at that information, have taken that and said, “OK, this is a good thing. Let’s continue to encourage them.” Donald Trump is doing what authoritarians throughout history have done. When they’re asked to condemn the violence of unofficial forces, they will grudgingly do that, while at the same time saying things like, you know, “Stand down and stand by” — in other words, “Wait and see.”
But I really want to emphasize that you cannot separate these white supremacist militias’ alleged plots to kidnap Democratic governors in this country from the fact that Trump has cultivated law enforcement as a political class, and he has openly and repeatedly encouraged them to act extrajudicially, to beat people harder, to not respect their rights. Trump threatened to send in the U.S. military at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests. Trump encouraged mayors and governors to beat them harder in the streets. We have a paramilitarized state of law enforcement in this country that also often acts as a white supremacist gang, particularly when facing down African Americans or Brown people or people of color. You know, that is something that I fear, that if we focus too much on the threat of white supremacist private actors at the expense of recognizing how the taxpayer-funded official forces also serve that same function, and with the full backing of the White House, that we’re sort of being misdirected here. This is a systemic problem. And the Proud Boys of the world and the Ku Klux Klans of the world and the militias of the world, they essentially are auxiliary forces for official government forces that often function as effective white supremacist militias, particularly in Black communities.
AMY GOODMAN: And then you have, for example, Kenosha, where they come together, where you have these white vigilantes come in, saying they are protecting private property, and the authorities there, the law enforcement authorities, are supporting them. And then you have —
JEREMY SCAHILL: Giving them water.
AMY GOODMAN: — Kyle Rittenhouse — giving them water, saying, “We support you here.” And then you have this 17-year-old, Kyle Rittenhouse, who opened fire and kills two Black Lives Matter activists. President Trump defends him.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah. I mean, Donald —
AMY GOODMAN: And he is not killed by federal authorities, as we saw happen in Oregon.
JEREMY SCAHILL: No. And, in fact, at these Black Lives Matter protests, when these vile so-called counterprotesters show up, you know, we’ve seen people fire bow and arrow — you know, arrows from crossbows at protesters. We’ve seen the use of vehicles as a lethal or semi-lethal weapon against protesters — more than a hundred cases of individuals using their cars. And I believe, at last count, eight of them were police officers that actually had used vehicles to ram into protesters.
But Donald Trump, on a domestic level, is saying that someone like Kyle Rittenhouse is sort of — you know, he’s misunderstood, and he’s essentially on the right side of history. And he does the same thing abroad. You know, Trump has pardoned outright war criminals who have committed massacres against civilians abroad. And at home, he has, at his rallies, offered to pay the legal fees of people that beat up protesters. He has encouraged the police to act with more brutality. He has consistently staked out a position that says that if you kill in the name of protecting the real America — white America — then we’re going to be there for you, we’ve got your back.
And that’s a very, very frightening, overt manifestation of a white supremacy that’s at the core of this country, that has never been fully addressed. And it’s why we’re seeing someone like Trump able to pull this off. We do not have a true opposition in the form of the Democratic Party on a legislative level. Quite the contrary, they’ve consistently supported some of Trump’s most dangerous tools available to the executive branch.


democracynow--2020-10-19--Headlines for October 19, 2020

Headlines for October 19, 2020

There are now over 40 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 around the world .
The U.S. has topped 8.1 million cases , remaining by far the most infected country , with around 20 % of known cases globally .
The U.S. death toll is nearing 220,000 .
On Friday , the U.S. reported around 70,000 new cases , the highest daily total since July .
At least 12 states set single-day case records since Friday .
Only two states — Vermont and Missouri — reported significant decreases in reported cases over the past week .
In an interview with CBS @ @ @ @ @ @ @ top White House Coronavirus Task Force scientist Anthony Fauci shared his reaction when he saw the Rose Garden ceremony for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett on TV last month .
Dr. Anthony Fauci : “ Absolutely not .
I was worried that he was going to get sick when I saw him in a completely precarious situation of crowded , no separation between people , and almost nobody wearing a mask .
When I saw that on TV , I said , 'Oh my goodness .
Nothing good can come out of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a problem.
’ And then , sure enough , it turned out to be a superspreader event.
” At around the same time as Fauci ’ s interview aired Sunday , Trump spoke at a campaign rally in Carson City , Nevada , where he mocked Joe Biden , warning there would be more lockdowns if Biden is elected .
In response , the Biden campaign said in a statement , “ Donald Trump tanked the strong economy he inherited … by continually discounting and attacking warnings from the scientific and medical experts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Now new coronavirus cases are surging and layoffs are rising.
” Joe Biden campaigned in the key battleground state of North Carolina this weekend , as running mate Senator Kamala Harris is back on the campaign trail and will appear today in Orlando and Jacksonville , Florida .
Trump also held rallies in two other coronavirus hot spots over the weekend — Michigan and Wisconsin — just as state officials reported record-high COVID-19 cases .
Meanwhile , Trump ’ s top coronavirus adviser Scott Atlas — known for pushing a “ herd @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , “ Masks work ?
NO.
” Twitter blocked the post for violating a policy on misleading information about COVID-19 .
A federal judge struck down a Trump rule that would have thrown 700,000 people off food stamps , known as SNAP , or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program , amid the pandemic and record unemployment .

There are now over 40 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 around the world. The U.S. has topped 8.1 million cases, remaining by far the most infected country, with around 20% of known cases globally. The U.S. death toll is nearing 220,000. On Friday, the U.S. reported around 70,000 new cases, the highest daily total since July. At least 12 states set single-day case records since Friday. Only two states — Vermont and Missouri — reported significant decreases in reported cases over the past week.
In an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” top White House Coronavirus Task Force scientist Anthony Fauci shared his reaction when he saw the Rose Garden ceremony for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett on TV last month.
Dr. Jonathan LaPook: “Were you surprised that President Trump got sick?”
Dr. Anthony Fauci: “Absolutely not. I was worried that he was going to get sick when I saw him in a completely precarious situation of crowded, no separation between people, and almost nobody wearing a mask. When I saw that on TV, I said, 'Oh my goodness. Nothing good can come out of that. That's got to be a problem.’ And then, sure enough, it turned out to be a superspreader event.”
At around the same time as Fauci’s interview aired Sunday, Trump spoke at a campaign rally in Carson City, Nevada, where he mocked Joe Biden, warning there would be more lockdowns if Biden is elected.
President Donald Trump: “If I listened totally to the scientists, we would right now have a country that would be in a massive depression, instead of we’re like a rocketship.”
In response, the Biden campaign said in a statement, “Donald Trump tanked the strong economy he inherited … by continually discounting and attacking warnings from the scientific and medical experts working around the clock to save lives. Now new coronavirus cases are surging and layoffs are rising.” Joe Biden campaigned in the key battleground state of North Carolina this weekend, as running mate Senator Kamala Harris is back on the campaign trail and will appear today in Orlando and Jacksonville, Florida.
Trump also held rallies in two other coronavirus hot spots over the weekend — Michigan and Wisconsin — just as state officials reported record-high COVID-19 cases.
Meanwhile, Trump’s top coronavirus adviser Scott Atlas — known for pushing a “herd immunity” strategy — tweeted this weekend, “Masks work? NO.” Twitter blocked the post for violating a policy on misleading information about COVID-19.
A federal judge struck down a Trump rule that would have thrown 700,000 people off food stamps, known as SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, amid the pandemic and record unemployment.


democracynow--2020-10-20--"A Fire That Has Spread Across the Country": Jelani Cobb on Voter Suppression in the 2020 Election

This is a rush transcript .
Copy may not be in its final form .
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now !
, democracynow.org , The Quarantine Report .
I ’ m Amy Goodman , with Juan González .
Today marks two weeks from November 3rd , official Election Day .
Amidst the pandemic , more than 30 million people nationwide have already voted through mail-in ballots or early voting — about a fifth of the total number of votes cast in 2016 .
It ’ s shattering all records for voting .
Early voting begins today in Wisconsin @ @ @ @ @ @ @ United States choose their next president , we spend the rest of the hour with journalist and professor Jelani Cobb .
In the new Frontline documentary Whose Vote Counts , Cobb collaborates with Columbia Journalism School , Columbia Journalism Investigations and reporters from USA Today Network to examine one of the first elections held during the pandemic : Wisconsin ’ s April 2020 primary .
This is an excerpt of the film , which he narrates .
AMY GOODMAN : An excerpt from the Frontline documentary Whose Vote Counts , premiering tonight , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 30 seconds , we ’ ll be joined by Jelani Cobb , the documentary ’ s producer [ sic ] .
We ’ ll be back with him in 30 seconds .
AMY GOODMAN : “ Song of the Count ” by the Count .
This is Democracy Now !
I ’ m Amy Goodman , with Juan González .
We ’ re joined by Jelani Cobb , the producer [ sic ] and narrator of the — and reporter of the Frontline documentary Whose Vote Counts , that premieres tonight on PBS @ @ @ @ @ @ @ journalism at Columbia University and a contributor to The New Yorker magazine .
Jelani , it ’ s great to have you back with us .
You talk about Wisconsin , which begins early voting today , as a kind of microcosm of America .
Why ?
Why did you focus there ?
And what are you most concerned about ?
JELANI COBB : Well , I mean , there were so many things in Wisconsin .
You know , we were looking at all of the potential obstacles .
So , we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and we were looking at all the potential dynamics that could impede people ’ s ability to cast a ballot .
And when we were looking around , we saw Wisconsin — just so many of them were happening in Wisconsin .
And it was also important for us to look at Wisconsin not only because of what ’ s happened there in the last decade under Scott Walker and the Republican Legislature and the extreme gerrymandering that ’ s there , the really strict voter ID law , one of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ — you know , all of those things that we thought were significant , but also they were — this is a state where the presidency was essentially decided in the last election .
You know , just that sliver of 22,000 votes , and things would turn out a different way .
And so , that was all looking around and saying that this was important .
And then , one other additional factor is that it ’ s a state in the North , where we wanted people to be aware @ @ @ @ @ @ @ John Lewis story of Selma and Mississippi and Georgia and South Carolina , the places that we know to be the kind of usual suspects as it relates to voter suppression .
We ’ re now looking at a fire that has spread across the country .
And we ’ re dealing with voter suppression concerns in safe states that were in the Union , and Wisconsin , which is where the Republican Party was founded by people who were outraged by the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Compromise that might have allowed the spread of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ And so you have this bastion of progressivism , this place that is a cornerstone of American progressive politics , and now we ’ re mired in a situation wondering about whether or not people will have access to the vote .
And one last thing I do want to say before I kind of go to the further conversation is that I ’ m the correspondent and narrator for the film , but my colleagues June Cross and Tom Jennings were the producers for it .
JUAN GONZÁLEZ : Jelani , I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the history of progressivism .
Wisconsin is known not only as the birthplace of the Republican Party , but deep into the 20th century was also a hotbed of Republican progressivism — JUAN GONZÁLEZ : — of Bob La Follette and also of — JUAN GONZÁLEZ : — the very extensive socialist movement .
There were even — JUAN GONZÁLEZ : — socialist mayors in Milwaukee up until the mid-20th century .
JUAN GONZÁLEZ : So , could you — were you able to get at what has happened to have this dramatic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ edge of voter suppression ?
JELANI COBB : Sure .
And I ’ ll just say really quick an aside , Juan , it ’ s really great to talk to you .
I use your book in my class .
And so , I ’ m glad to be able to have this conversation with you .
Well , you know , with Wisconsin , there ’ s a really good book on this , Dan Kaufman ’ s book , The Fall of Wisconsin , where he traces this .
And @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was the involvement of the Bradley Foundation , which is a foundation that was spun off from an industrial magnate , a set of two brothers , who , initially , in the first part of the 20th century , when they began getting into philanthropy , they were doing things that were pretty mundane , you know , supporting local causes and being a boon to community concerns .
And then they kind of veered seriously to the right in the 1970s , 1980s , and began funding efforts , especially around @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Scott Walker was , by and large , a product of the Bradley Foundation ’ s largesse .
And it was really a kind of idea that they wanted to make Wisconsin — after 2008 , in full steam , to make Wisconsin a laboratory for what they wanted to do in the rest of the country .
And so , it almost seems too perfect .
When we look at the issues that are there , it ’ s a kind of checklist of the things that we think about with the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unions , the assault on voter protections , the assault on all the aspects of the social safety net .
And from my lifetime growing up , we ’ re not talking about Wisconsin as a purple state or a battleground state , but for most of my life we ’ ve thought about Wisconsin as a fairly progressive and safely Democratic state .
And this has been a product of very much a concerted effort over the past decade — well , the past several decades by private philanthropy there .
JUAN @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lot on the battle especially over the legal fights over absentee ballots .
Now , I know President Trump is constantly talking about that mail ballots are fraudulent .
Obviously , there ’ s not a whole lot of — or , very little to buttress that argument .
But there are concerns that , and anyone who has done a mail-in ballot knows that , it ’ s a lot more complicated to fill it out properly .
JUAN GONZÁLEZ : And it ’ s a lot easier for ballots to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
I ’ m wondering if you could talk about the potential for significant numbers of people who do vote to — because they are doing a mail-in ballot , that they don ’ t fill it out correctly and that it then gets rejected at the count time .
JELANI COBB : Well , so , I think , if anything , the last four years have taught us to fairly reliably look at what Donald Trump accuses other people of , and that ’ s a pretty good indicator of what @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
And so , the allegations that mail-in voting is rife with fraud and , you know , people cheat , and they do all these — that doesn ’ t hold up , you know , including states like Oregon , where they conduct their elections entirely by mail .
And not only do they have successful elections with no significant hint of there being ballots that are improperly cast or people cheating , but they consistently have one of the highest voter turnout rates in the country — and sometimes the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
And I ’ ll come back to that and the relevance of that for 2020 in a minute .
But the opposite side of this is that we do see there being a disparity in the number of absentee ballots that are rejected , particularly as they come from communities of color .
And that was one of the things that the Columbia Journalism Investigations team found when they delved into the rejected voter rolls in Wisconsin and then traced those down to particular communities .
Communities that were heavily Black and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ballots rejected .
This shouldn ’ t be entirely a shock , if we remember back to just 2018 , when we saw the battles around exact-match signature ballots in Georgia and what Brian Kemp was attempting to do in terms of using the exact match between the absentee ballot and the signature that they have on file for you , and if there was any disparity between those two things , they would toss the ballot , or if there was any disparity between how your name was spelled , including having @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or may not appear on your driver ’ s license and so on , then your ballot would be tossed .
And so , those same sort of dynamics appear to have been the case on April 7th and could potentially — the real kind of foreboding thing is that they could potentially have the same sort of impact or the same sort of dynamic in the ballots that are being cast ahead of November 3rd .
AMY GOODMAN : Jelani , I wanted to turn to a clip of your documentary Whose @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Democratic National Committee ’ s top lawyer , Marc Elias , as well as others .
AMY GOODMAN : So , that ’ s the Democratic National Committee ’ s top lawyer , Marc Elias .
You spend some amount of time in this documentary , Jelani , speaking to him .
There are hundreds of these challenges all over the country .
AMY GOODMAN : Can you talk about his significance and these lawsuits , and whether you see , on Election Day , the whole election being thrown into court , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the Supreme Court , which might have a new justice on that Supreme Court named Amy Coney Barrett ?
JELANI COBB : Right .
And so , I think the comparison you might make is if you are preparing to watch a baseball game , and then the coaches of the respective teams come out and they start arguing over who ’ s going to bat first , and then they ’ re arguing about how many innings there are going to be , and then there ’ s a dispute about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ strike out and how many balls it will take to walk , and every single aspect of how the game is played is up for dispute .
So , really , the winner will wind up being the team that fares best with only two outs instead of three , or fares best in seven innings instead of nine .
And that ’ s really what we ’ re seeing now .
These lawsuits across the country are fighting about how much early voting there will be , about how long after the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mail can come in and still be counted , when they have to be postmarked by .
But every kind of particular particularity that you can imagine as it relates to this election is being fought over .
And there are — I think the last count , there were 241 lawsuits between the Democrats , Republicans , outside interested parties .
And they ’ re going through dozens of states .
And so , when we get to the tallies on November 3rd , and however long after that it takes for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , some part of that will reflect what was won and what was lost in these lawsuits that have been kind of working their way through the system for the past several months .
JUAN GONZÁLEZ : And , Jelani , you mentioned these battles .
I recall back in the 2000 election , when they were counting ballots in Florida , that the Republican Party fought very hard to assure that military ballots , absentee ballots that had come in from overseas after the deadline would still be counted , and raised @ @ @ @ @ @ @ servicemen overseas ?
And they successfully got an extension for the military ballots that were coming in late .
Now we ’ re seeing Republican Party doing the opposite , trying to prevent — JUAN GONZÁLEZ : — any ballots that come in after the Election Day from being counted .
But I wanted to ask you about Hans von Spakovsky , who you deal with , and the role he ’ s played in shaping the narrative for the Republican Party around absentee ballots and how they ’ re subject to fraud @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as a quick point about your first point relating to people fighting to have absentee ballots from military , military people serving in the Armed Forces , still be counted , you know , the entire Republican Party is not a monolith on this , you know , so what Donald Trump says and what other people in the party will tell you , if you kind of talk to them , are not necessarily the same thing , because a lot of older people prefer to cast their ballots by mail , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ electorate is older .
And so , when you start hearing the tirades about don ’ t trust mail-in votes , the absentee votes are all riddled with fraud and cheating and so on , there ’ s a quiet panic among a number of people who are Republicans , who are saying , “ Listen , we could really , like , mess around and disenfranchise part of our own electorate here.
” And so , I think that ’ s been a concern , a very obvious concern .
Now , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an interesting figure .
I would say , arguably , more than anyone else , von Spakovsky is responsible for the promulgation and proliferation of the concern about voter fraud .
You know , this has been his issue .
He has been their guy on this thing .
He created a database with the Heritage Foundation that logs instances of alleged voter fraud .
Our investigation pointed to something else , that many of the cases that were there were simply people who had made — JELANI COBB : — people who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so on .
And so , he ’ s really been more responsible than anyone else for promulgating the myth of voter fraud .
AMY GOODMAN : Well , we are going to do Part 2 of our interview at democracynow.org .
Check it out , with Jelani Cobb , correspondent and writer for the new PBS Frontline documentary Whose Vote Counts , that premieres tonight , Tuesday night , directed by June Cross , produced by Tom Jennings .
Cobb is also professor of journalism at Columbia University and contributor to The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to him about Biden ’ s moral imperative to safeguard civil rights , and Election Day violence , a history .
I ’ m Amy Goodman , with Juan González .
Thanks so much for joining us .

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
Today marks two weeks from November 3rd, official Election Day. Amidst the pandemic, more than 30 million people nationwide have already voted through mail-in ballots or early voting — about a fifth of the total number of votes cast in 2016. It’s shattering all records for voting. Early voting begins today in Wisconsin and Utah.
As voters in the United States choose their next president, we spend the rest of the hour with journalist and professor Jelani Cobb. In the new Frontline documentary Whose Vote Counts, Cobb collaborates with Columbia Journalism School, Columbia Journalism Investigations and reporters from USA Today Network to examine one of the first elections held during the pandemic: Wisconsin’s April 2020 primary. This is an excerpt of the film, which he narrates.
REPORTER 1: Long lines as folks wait for their polling place.
WISCONSIN VOTER 1: They’ve made it so difficult for people to vote here, just asking too much of people to come out with this virus going on.
JELANI COBB: It was a major election in the middle of a pandemic.
WISCONSIN VOTER 2: There’s been confusion around what actually is allowed.
WISCONSIN VOTER 3: It was difficult to request an absentee ballot.
WISCONSIN VOTER 4: I didn’t even know how to do it.
WISCONSIN VOTER 5: I didn’t know about that option to vote through the absentee voting.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Mail ballots, they cheat, OK? People cheat. Mail ballots are fraudulent in many cases.
JELANI COBB: Absentee ballots delayed in the mail.
WISCONSIN VOTER 6: I requested an absentee ballot.
WISCONSIN VOTER 7: But it didn’t come in time.
WISCONSIN VOTER 8: It never came.
WISCONSIN VOTER 9: So I was forced to go and vote.
WISCONSIN VOTER 10: At one of the five polling stations.
JELANI COBB: Voters forced to choose between their health and their civic duty.
REPORTER 2: Those lines are long in Wisconsin, despite the state’s safer-at-home order.
WISCONSIN VOTER 11: It is unethical.
WISCONSIN VOTER 1: It was such a putrid decision.
WISCONSIN VOTER 12: People are going to die because of this.
JELANI COBB: Claims of voter suppression.
REPORTER 3: Any ballots received after April 13th will be rejected.
REPORTER 4: Seven hundred fifty ballots so far have been rejected.
WISCONSIN VOTER 13: I am really frustrated because my vote won’t count.
WISCONSIN VOTER 14: It was the most blatant form of voter suppression.
JELANI COBB: Was this all a view of things to come —
WISCONSIN VOTER 15: I just can’t imagine that somebody would do that in this country.
JELANI COBB: — in the impending presidential election?
I’m a journalist and historian. I’ve been studying American elections for years, but I’ve never seen anything like this moment, the threat of a constitutional crisis over an election where the votes of many Americans, especially people of color, may not count.
First of all, were you able to vote?
WISCONSIN VOTER 1: You know, I was not. But I had a absentee ballot.
JELANI COBB: These people wanted to vote this past April in the battleground state of Wisconsin, a primary that would turn out to be a telling dress rehearsal for the election chaos the rest of the country is now engulfed in.
WISCONSIN VOTER 16: I think we’re seeing elected officials, specifically on the Republican side, that are playing politics with people’s lives.
JELANI COBB: I started focusing on the state because of its pivotal and deeply partisan nature. It’s split down the middle between Republicans and Democrats, and it gave Donald Trump the presidency in 2016 by the exceedingly thin margin of 22,000 votes. It’s a microcosm of America these days.
WISCONSIN VOTER 12: I do believe that there is an attack on our democracy right now.
JELANI COBB: Along with colleagues at the Columbia Journalism School, I began doing remote interviews there when the pandemic was just taking hold.
WISCONSIN VOTER 11: We don’t need to be trying to have an election in the middle of a pandemic.
JELANI COBB: With reporters from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and USA Today, we examined the voting, especially the absentee ballots, how they were used and counted, and the political and legal fights around them.
AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt from the Frontline documentary Whose Vote Counts, premiering tonight, Tuesday night, on PBS. In 30 seconds, we’ll be joined by Jelani Cobb, the documentary’s producer [sic]. We’ll be back with him in 30 seconds.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: “Song of the Count” by the Count. This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. We’re joined by Jelani Cobb, the producer [sic] and narrator of the — and reporter of the Frontline documentary Whose Vote Counts, that premieres tonight on PBS. He’s a professor of journalism at Columbia University and a contributor to The New Yorker magazine.
Jelani, it’s great to have you back with us. You talk about Wisconsin, which begins early voting today, as a kind of microcosm of America. Why? Why did you focus there? And what are you most concerned about?
JELANI COBB: Well, I mean, there were so many things in Wisconsin. You know, we were looking at all of the potential obstacles. So, we started this project before the coronavirus hit, and we were looking at all the potential dynamics that could impede people’s ability to cast a ballot. And when we were looking around, we saw Wisconsin — just so many of them were happening in Wisconsin. And it was also important for us to look at Wisconsin not only because of what’s happened there in the last decade under Scott Walker and the Republican Legislature and the extreme gerrymandering that’s there, the really strict voter ID law, one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country — you know, all of those things that we thought were significant, but also they were — this is a state where the presidency was essentially decided in the last election. You know, just that sliver of 22,000 votes, and things would turn out a different way. And so, that was all looking around and saying that this was important.
And then, one other additional factor is that it’s a state in the North, where we wanted people to be aware that this is not just the familiar John Lewis story of Selma and Mississippi and Georgia and South Carolina, the places that we know to be the kind of usual suspects as it relates to voter suppression. We’re now looking at a fire that has spread across the country. And we’re dealing with voter suppression concerns in safe states that were in the Union, and Wisconsin, which is where the Republican Party was founded by people who were outraged by the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Compromise that might have allowed the spread of — the further spread of slavery. And so you have this bastion of progressivism, this place that is a cornerstone of American progressive politics, and now we’re mired in a situation wondering about whether or not people will have access to the vote.
And one last thing I do want to say before I kind of go to the further conversation is that I’m the correspondent and narrator for the film, but my colleagues June Cross and Tom Jennings were the producers for it.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Jelani, I wanted to ask you — you mentioned the history of progressivism. Wisconsin is known not only as the birthplace of the Republican Party, but deep into the 20th century was also a hotbed of Republican progressivism —
JELANI COBB: Yes.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — of Bob La Follette and also of —
JELANI COBB: Yeah.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — the very extensive socialist movement. There were even —
JELANI COBB: Yeah.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — socialist mayors in Milwaukee up until the mid-20th century.
JELANI COBB: Yeah.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So, could you — were you able to get at what has happened to have this dramatic shift now into this sort of leading edge of voter suppression?
JELANI COBB: Sure. And I’ll just say really quick an aside, Juan, it’s really great to talk to you. I use your book in my class. And so, I’m glad to be able to have this conversation with you.
Well, you know, with Wisconsin, there’s a really good book on this, Dan Kaufman’s book, The Fall of Wisconsin, where he traces this. And one of the real key factors here was the involvement of the Bradley Foundation, which is a foundation that was spun off from an industrial magnate, a set of two brothers, who, initially, in the first part of the 20th century, when they began getting into philanthropy, they were doing things that were pretty mundane, you know, supporting local causes and being a boon to community concerns. And then they kind of veered seriously to the right in the 1970s, 1980s, and began funding efforts, especially around anti-labor union activism.
And so, Scott Walker was, by and large, a product of the Bradley Foundation’s largesse. And it was really a kind of idea that they wanted to make Wisconsin — after 2008, in full steam, to make Wisconsin a laboratory for what they wanted to do in the rest of the country. And so, it almost seems too perfect. When we look at the issues that are there, it’s a kind of checklist of the things that we think about with the right wing and the assault on labor unions, the assault on voter protections, the assault on all the aspects of the social safety net. And from my lifetime growing up, we’re not talking about Wisconsin as a purple state or a battleground state, but for most of my life we’ve thought about Wisconsin as a fairly progressive and safely Democratic state. And this has been a product of very much a concerted effort over the past decade — well, the past several decades by private philanthropy there.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And your documentary focuses a lot on the battle especially over the legal fights over absentee ballots. Now, I know President Trump is constantly talking about that mail ballots are fraudulent. Obviously, there’s not a whole lot of — or, very little to buttress that argument. But there are concerns that, and anyone who has done a mail-in ballot knows that, it’s a lot more complicated to fill it out properly.
JELANI COBB: Right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And it’s a lot easier for ballots to be rejected at the time of the count. I’m wondering if you could talk about the potential for significant numbers of people who do vote to — because they are doing a mail-in ballot, that they don’t fill it out correctly and that it then gets rejected at the count time.
JELANI COBB: Well, so, I think, if anything, the last four years have taught us to fairly reliably look at what Donald Trump accuses other people of, and that’s a pretty good indicator of what it is he’s actually doing. And so, the allegations that mail-in voting is rife with fraud and, you know, people cheat, and they do all these — that doesn’t hold up, you know, including states like Oregon, where they conduct their elections entirely by mail. And not only do they have successful elections with no significant hint of there being ballots that are improperly cast or people cheating, but they consistently have one of the highest voter turnout rates in the country — and sometimes the highest voter turnout rate in the country. And I’ll come back to that and the relevance of that for 2020 in a minute.
But the opposite side of this is that we do see there being a disparity in the number of absentee ballots that are rejected, particularly as they come from communities of color. And that was one of the things that the Columbia Journalism Investigations team found when they delved into the rejected voter rolls in Wisconsin and then traced those down to particular communities. Communities that were heavily Black and Brown were more likely to have their ballots rejected. This shouldn’t be entirely a shock, if we remember back to just 2018, when we saw the battles around exact-match signature ballots in Georgia and what Brian Kemp was attempting to do in terms of using the exact match between the absentee ballot and the signature that they have on file for you, and if there was any disparity between those two things, they would toss the ballot, or if there was any disparity between how your name was spelled, including having a hyphen in your name that may or may not appear on your driver’s license and so on, then your ballot would be tossed. And so, those same sort of dynamics appear to have been the case on April 7th and could potentially — the real kind of foreboding thing is that they could potentially have the same sort of impact or the same sort of dynamic in the ballots that are being cast ahead of November 3rd.
AMY GOODMAN: Jelani, I wanted to turn to a clip of your documentary Whose Vote Counts, where you interview the Democratic National Committee’s top lawyer, Marc Elias, as well as others.
JELANI COBB: The national parties joined the fight. What they would do here would be a harbinger for the coming presidential election. The Democratic National Committee filed one of several lawsuits to make absentee voting easier, seeking to loosen requirements like voter ID and witness signatures, things that historically have been obstacles, especially for people of color.
MARC ELIAS: The DNC filed the initial lawsuit when it became clear that there were going to be serious problems with availability for voting.
JELANI COBB: Marc Elias is the DNC’s top lawyer.
What exactly is at stake? And I mean this on the granular level. There are multiple and dozens of lawsuits. What’s being fought over?
MARC ELIAS: Most of what’s being fought over is the ability for voters to have access to the polls and for their votes to count. A lot of the litigation we’re seeing in 2020 is: Are mail-in ballots going to be rejected for technical reasons, or are we going to enfranchise voters?
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s the Democratic National Committee’s top lawyer, Marc Elias. You spend some amount of time in this documentary, Jelani, speaking to him. There are hundreds of these challenges all over the country.
JELANI COBB: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about his significance and these lawsuits, and whether you see, on Election Day, the whole election being thrown into court, of course, which could ultimately lead to the Supreme Court, which might have a new justice on that Supreme Court named Amy Coney Barrett?
JELANI COBB: Right. And so, I think the comparison you might make is if you are preparing to watch a baseball game, and then the coaches of the respective teams come out and they start arguing over who’s going to bat first, and then they’re arguing about how many innings there are going to be, and then there’s a dispute about how many pitches it will take to strike out and how many balls it will take to walk, and every single aspect of how the game is played is up for dispute. So, really, the winner will wind up being the team that fares best with only two outs instead of three, or fares best in seven innings instead of nine.
And that’s really what we’re seeing now. These lawsuits across the country are fighting about how much early voting there will be, about how long after the election a vote that is cast by mail can come in and still be counted, when they have to be postmarked by. But every kind of particular particularity that you can imagine as it relates to this election is being fought over. And there are — I think the last count, there were 241 lawsuits between the Democrats, Republicans, outside interested parties. And they’re going through dozens of states. And so, when we get to the tallies on November 3rd, and however long after that it takes for us to understand who has actually won, some part of that will reflect what was won and what was lost in these lawsuits that have been kind of working their way through the system for the past several months.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jelani, you mentioned these battles. I recall back in the 2000 election, when they were counting ballots in Florida, that the Republican Party fought very hard to assure that military ballots, absentee ballots that had come in from overseas after the deadline would still be counted, and raised the issue: How can you disenfranchise servicemen overseas? And they successfully got an extension for the military ballots that were coming in late. Now we’re seeing Republican Party doing the opposite, trying to prevent —
JELANI COBB: Sure.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — any ballots that come in after the Election Day from being counted. But I wanted to ask you about Hans von Spakovsky, who you deal with, and the role he’s played in shaping the narrative for the Republican Party around absentee ballots and how they’re subject to fraud.
JELANI COBB: Sure. Just as a quick point about your first point relating to people fighting to have absentee ballots from military, military people serving in the Armed Forces, still be counted, you know, the entire Republican Party is not a monolith on this, you know, so what Donald Trump says and what other people in the party will tell you, if you kind of talk to them, are not necessarily the same thing, because a lot of older people prefer to cast their ballots by mail, and a disproportionate share of the Republican electorate is older. And so, when you start hearing the tirades about don’t trust mail-in votes, the absentee votes are all riddled with fraud and cheating and so on, there’s a quiet panic among a number of people who are Republicans, who are saying, “Listen, we could really, like, mess around and disenfranchise part of our own electorate here.” And so, I think that’s been a concern, a very obvious concern.
Now, about Hans von Spakovsky, he is an interesting figure. I would say, arguably, more than anyone else, von Spakovsky is responsible for the promulgation and proliferation of the concern about voter fraud. You know, this has been his issue. He has been their guy on this thing. He created a database with the Heritage Foundation that logs instances of alleged voter fraud. Our investigation pointed to something else, that many of the cases that were there were simply people who had made —
AMY GOODMAN: Jelani, we have 20 seconds.
JELANI COBB: — people who made mistakes in casting their ballot and so on. And so, he’s really been more responsible than anyone else for promulgating the myth of voter fraud.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we are going to do Part 2 of our interview at democracynow.org. Check it out, with Jelani Cobb, correspondent and writer for the new PBS Frontline documentary Whose Vote Counts, that premieres tonight, Tuesday night, directed by June Cross, produced by Tom Jennings. Cobb is also professor of journalism at Columbia University and contributor to The New Yorker magazine. We will speak to him about Biden’s moral imperative to safeguard civil rights, and Election Day violence, a history. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Thanks so much for joining us.