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big lie
Trump Taps Anti-Trans Lawyer Harmeet Dhillon for Key Civil Rights Post
"Dhillon has focused her career on diminishing civil rights, rather than enforcing or protecting them," argued one critic.
Dec 10, 2024
LGBTQ+ and voting rights defenders were among those who sounded the alarm Tuesday over Republican President-elect Donald Trump's selection of a San Francisco attorney known for fighting against transgender rights and for leading a right-wing lawyers' group that took part in Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election to oversee the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division.
On Monday, Trump announced his nomination of Harmeet Dhillon to head the key civil rights office, claiming on his Truth Social network that the former California Republican Party vice-chair "has stood up consistently to protect our cherished Civil Liberties, including taking on Big Tech for censoring our Free Speech, representing Christians who were prevented from praying together during COVID, and suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers."
"In her new role at the DOJ, Harmeet will be a tireless defender of our Constitutional Rights, and will enforce our Civil Rights and Election Laws FAIRLY and FIRMLY," Trump added.
However, prominent trans activist Erin Reed warned on her Substack that Dhillon's nomination—which requires Senate confirmation—"signals an alarming shift that could make life increasingly difficult for transgender people nationwide, including those who have sought refuge in blue states to escape anti-trans legislation."
Trump has picked Harmeet Dhillon as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. She has stated that it must be "made unsafe" for hospitals to provide trans care, and frequently shares Libs of TikTok posts. She intends to target trans people in blue states. Subscribe to support my journalism.
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— Erin Reed (@erininthemorning.com) December 10, 2024 at 8:14 AM
Reed continued:
Dhillon's most prominent work includes founding the Center for American Liberty, a legal organization that focuses heavily on anti-transgender cases in blue states. The organization's "featured cases" section highlights several lawsuits, such as Chloe Cole's case against Kaiser Permanente; a lawsuit challenging a Colorado school's use of a transgender student's preferred name; a case against a California school district seeking to implement policies that would forcibly out transgender students; and a lawsuit against Vermont for denying a foster care license to a family unwilling to comply with nondiscrimination policies regarding transgender youth.
Reed also highlighted Dhillon's attacks on state laws protecting transgender people, as well as her expression of "extreme anti-trans views" on social media—including calling gender-affirming healthcare for trans children "child abuse."
Last year, The Guardian's Jason Wilson reported that the Center for American Liberty made a six-figure payment to a public relations firm that represented Dhillion in both "her capacity as head of her own for-profit law firm and Republican activist."
Writing for the voting rights platform Democracy Docket, Matt Cohen on Tuesday accused Dhillon of being "one of the leading legal figures working to roll back voting rights across the country."
"In the past few years, Dhillon—or an attorney from her law firm—has been involved in more than a dozen different lawsuits in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. challenging voting rights laws, redistricting, election processes, or Trump's efforts to appear on the ballot in the 2024 election," Cohen noted.
As Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said in a statement Tuesday, "The Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division has the critical responsibility of enforcing our nation's federal civil rights laws and ensuring equal justice under the law on behalf of all of our communities."
"That means investigating police departments that have a pattern of police abuse, protecting the right to vote, and ensuring schools don't discriminate against children based on who they are," Wiley noted. "The nomination of Harmeet Dhillon to lead this critical civil rights office is yet another clear sign that this administration seeks to advance ideological viewpoints over the rights and protections that protect every person in this country."
"Dhillon has focused her career on diminishing civil rights, rather than enforcing or protecting them," she asserted. "Rather than fighting to expand voting access, she has worked to restrict it."
A staunch Trump loyalist, Dhillon has also embraced conspiracy theories including the former president's "Big Lie" that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and has accused Democrats of "conspiring to commit the biggest election interference fraud in world history."
She was co-chair of the Republican National Lawyers Association when it launched Lawyers for Trump, a group that urged the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene on behalf of the former president after he lost the 2020 election.
Cohen also highlighted Dhillon's ties to right-wing legal activist and Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo, described by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) as a "lawless con man and crook" for his refusal to comply with a Senate subpoena and his organization of lavish gifts to conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices.
"We need a leader at the Civil Rights Division who understands that civil rights protections are not partisan or political positions open to the ideological whims of those who seek to elevate a single religion or to protect political allies or particular groups over others," Wiley stressed. "We need a leader who will vigorously enforce our civil rights laws and work to protect the rights of all of our communities—including in voting, education, employment, housing, and public accommodations—without fear or favor."
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'The Big Lie Is Back' as Trump's GOP Reboots Felony-Facing Fake Electors
"The election deniers are back at it, laying the groundwork to run the Big Lie playbook once again," warned one swing-state campaigner.
Nov 04, 2024
At least 1 in 5 potential battleground state electors for former U.S. President Donald Trump are linked to the Republican nominee's attempt to subvert the 2020 election, according to an analysis published Monday.
Politico reported that "of the 93 Republicans designated as prospective presidential electors for Trump from the seven battleground states, eight are facing felony charges for signing false Electoral College certificates in 2020."
Five additional possible electors signed similar documents in 2020 but were not criminally charged, according to the reporting, while at least half a dozen others "played notable roles in challenging the results of the 2020 election or promoting election conspiracy theories."
"These people continued to peddle and push not misinformation, which is accidental, but disinformation, which is intentional."
With numerous Trump aides and GOP officials facing criminal charges for their alleged roles in the former president's bogus "Stop the Steal" scheme, experts say it is somewhat less likely that the Republican nominee or his allies would attempt another such plot. However, Trump and his boosters have recycled similar claims of election fraud in what critics say is a bid to spread misinformation and sow doubt about the outcome of Tuesday's contest if the 2020 loser is defeated by Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
"It does show a lack of regard for the criminal and ethical problems with doing this," Mary McCord, a Georgetown law professor and executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, told Politico.
As Politico notes:
Six of the returning fake electors hail from Michigan. John Haggard, Hank Choate, Timothy King, Meshawn Maddock, Amy Facchinello, and Marian Sheridan were among the group of Michiganders who signed a document in 2020 purporting to be official electoral certificates claiming the state’s electoral votes went to Donald Trump, despite Biden winning Michigan by more than 150,000 votes. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, brought felony charges against them, including forgery-related crimes punishable by up to 14 years. Those cases are ongoing and all have pleaded not guilty.
In the battleground state of Wisconsin—where President Joe Biden defeated Trump by less than 21,000 votes, or 0.63%, in 2020—"election deniers are back at it, laying the groundwork to run the Big Lie playbook once again through actions designed to attack the electoral process, sow seeds of chaos set to bloom post-election, and further undermine confidence in our democracy," warned Wisconsin Democracy Campaign executive director Nick Ramos in a Sunday opinion piece in the Cap Times.
"That is exactly what their antics wrought after the 2020 election—chaos resulting in the January 6 insurrection and years of baseless conspiracy theories that did not, and will not, succeed in changing a single election result but did succeed in undermining the confidence of millions of Americans in our democracy," he continued.
"The bullies are back again, continuing their strategy to interfere in Wisconsin's elections," Ramos added.
While some observers claim that would-be election subversives are likely to tread gingerly in light of the potential criminal consequences for alleged Big Lie conspirators, McCord said that "it would appear that the party leadership in the states where there are fraudulent electors serving as electors again are not taking seriously things like the criminal charges that have been brought against these fraudulent electors."
Amy Tarkanian, a former chair of the Nevada Republican Party, told Politico that "these people continued to peddle and push not misinformation, which is accidental, but disinformation, which is intentional."
"It's definitely disappointing," she lamented.
In Arizona—where former state GOP chief Kelli Ward and 11 other Republican officials have been criminally charged in connection with the alleged fake electors scheme—current Republican Party Chair Gina Swoboda has been pushing spurious election fraud claims. This, even as Loraine Pellegrino, a past president of a right-wing women's group who falsely attested that Trump won Arizona in 2020, earlier this year became the first person convicted in the state's fake electors case.
Democracy defenders have sounded the alarm on the potential for violence fueled by baseless claims of election fraud.
The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism said last week that it is "seeing the same warning signs of political violence based on election denialism combined with violent language across fringe platforms that we saw in the weeks before the 2020 election and before the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol."
According to a YouGov poll published Saturday, just over two-thirds of respondents—including more than 80% of surveyed Democrats and 55% of Republicans— believe it is either "somewhat" or "very likely" that Trump will refuse to concede if he loses to Harris.
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GOP Already Preparing Big Lie 2.0 If Trump Loses, Experts Warn
"Undermining the legitimacy of an election is how demagogues destroy faith in democracy," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Nov 01, 2024
With Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his allies in key swing states already questioning voting processes and claiming Democrats and election officials are "cheating" days before Election Day, one policy strategist said Thursday that election deniers took one lesson away from their attempts to overturn the 2020 results.
"We saw it in 2020 and I think the lesson Trump and his allies have learned since is that they have to sow these ideas early," Kyle Miller of the advocacy group Protect Democracy toldReuters.
Trump wrote on social media Thursday that "we caught them CHEATING BIG" in Miller's home state of Pennsylvania, and calling for criminal prosecutions, but election officials have said there is no evidence of fraud in early voting processes that took place in October.
Trump's campaign took legal action on Wednesday against Bucks County election officials, saying voters wanting to submit early mail-in ballots had been unfairly turned away when authorities told them the early voting deadline had passed. A judge ordered the county to extend voting by one day.
"This week, we are seeing that Donald Trump is clearly worried that he's going to lose the election," said a campaign official for Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday. "How do we know that? Well, we know it because he's ramping up baseless claims of election fraud and irregularities."
Election officials discovered potentially fraudulent registrations in Lancaster and York counties, which appeared to have been filled out in the same handwriting. But authorities said the flagged registrations did not raise the risk that ballots would be cast fraudulently and were likely tied to a paid "large-scale canvassing operation."
"This is a sign that the built-in safeguards in our voter registration process are working," Al Schmidt, secretary of the commonwealth, told Reuters.
Nevertheless, Trump and his allies have seized on the incidents as evidence that Democrats are attempting to steal the election.
Trump and his running mate, U.S. Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), have both continued spreading the "Big Lie" that Trump did not lose the 2020 election, and both have expressed doubt that they will accept an election loss if Harris is declared the winner.
The former president said he will accept the results only if he finds them to be "fair and legal and good," and told rally attendees in September that "the only way we're gonna lose" would be if Democrats cheat.
Vance said in October that he would accept the results in Pennsylvania, a primary focus of election deniers in 2020, if "only legal American citizens vote," alluding to a push made by Republicans including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) this year to claim voting by noncitizens is rampant in U.S. elections—even though it is prohibited by federal law.
Republicans in the U.S. House passed a bill earlier this year to stop noncitizens from voting—legislation that experts say was designed to spread a false narrative that could then be used to deny the election results.
"This will be one of the primary, but among many, false claims made if Trump loses," David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, toldThe Guardian. "And it will be false, but it still could be dangerous because it could incite his supporters to believing a totally secure election was stolen."
In Michigan on Wednesday, The New York Times reported that a "well-organized network of election denial activists" amplified the news of a small glitch in voting report which made it appear that a single voter's name was used to cast multiple ballots. The error was quickly corrected, but the far-right website Gateway Pundit claimed it had a "bombshell" report about absentee ballots in the state.
The Guardian on Friday also reported on dozens polls being conducted by Republican-aligned groups in the last days before the election, which have shown Trump with a decisive lead—contrasting with highly regarded nonpartisan polls that have consistently shown Trump and Harris in a dead heat.
GOP-aligned groups have released 37 polls in recent days, according to a New York Times study, with all but seven showing Trump in the lead.
One survey by the Trafalgar Group had Trump winning by three points in North Carolina, while a CNN poll showed Harris winning by one point in the battleground state.
Trump told supporters at a New Mexico campaign event on Thursday that he is "leading big in the polls, all of the polls."
With 63% of Republicans reporting earlier this year that they believed Trump was the true winner of the 2020 election, Trump's claims about polling may be enough to garner significant support for another attempt to overturn the election results after November 5, experts say.
"It is vital to Donald Trump's effort if he tries to cheat and overturn the election results, he needs to have data showing that somehow he was winning the election," Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg told The Guardian. "The reason we have to call this out is that Donald Trump needs to go into Election Day with some set of data showing him winning, so if he loses, he can say we cheated."
On Friday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said it is all but certain that Trump will declare victory on November 5 and that he is setting the stage to accuse Democrats of "vote stealing."
At least 35 election officials who have refused to certify elections since 2020 are now serving on election boards, according to a report by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).
Pro-democracy advocates say the recent GOP-aligned polls, baseless claims about illegal voting, and laser focus on minor errors in voting processes are all likely to be used by Trump and his allies to stop the certification of a potential Harris victory.
"The effort to try to subvert the outcome," Sean Morales-Doyle of the Brennan Center for Justice told The Guardian, "is more thought-out, more strategic, more organized, more coordinated [than] in 2020."
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