On Monday, The Daily Beast reported that new court filings reveal federal investigators served search warrants to Parler, a right-wing social media platform billed as a Twitter alternative, as part of their investigation into Enrique Tarrio and other members of the Proud Boys.
"A new evidence list in the Proud Boys January 6 trial shows that feds executed search warrants on Parler, the right-wing social media site, in connection with leader Enrique Tarrio and other Proud Boys who hyped up calls for violence ahead of the Capitol attack," reported Kelly Weill. "Five Proud Boys — including Tarrio, the group’s former leader — are each facing nine or more charges for their alleged actions on Jan. 6. Prosecutors say the group engaged in seditious conspiracy when they allegedly plotted to storm the Capitol and prevent lawmakers from certifying President Joe Biden’s election."
According to the report, the filing suggests a broader, "sweeping" investigation into the activities of the Proud Boys, a self-styled "Western Chauvinist" group known for its links to white supremacists and its violent street brawls.
"Some of the defendants have fought to block evidence in the case, arguing that internal Proud Boys documents are irrelevant or that they paint the group in a bad light," said the report. "In filings late last week, prosecutors argued that it’s the Proud Boys’ own fault if they look bad in the internal messages, pointing to a defendant who used a racist slur in his username."
In addition to the conspiracy charges, Tarrio is facing a civil suit accusing him of fomenting violence in the attack on the U.S. Capitol — a case in which he plans to represent himself.
Parler, one of many right-wing Twitter clones including Gab, GETTR, and former President Donald Trump's own Truth Social, was already useful in helping geolocate the movement of many of the rioters as they traveled from Trump's "Stop the Steal" rally on the National Mall to the Capitol Complex. Pro-Trump rapper Kanye "Ye" West, known recently for his outspoken anti-Semitic rants, agreed to buy Parler earlier this month, but the deal is already riddled with problems.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A member of the far-right Oath Keepers group who took part in the attack on the U.S. Capitol in January 2021 compared it to the 1789 storming of the Bastille prison in the French Revolution on Monday, and said he hoped to "disrupt Congress" from certifying President Joe Biden's 2020 election victory.
In at times emotional testimony, Graydon Young of Englewood, Florida, told a jury that he joined the Oath Keepers in late 2020, driven by fears that Congress would certify the election that President Donald Trump's allies falsely claimed was stolen through widespread voter fraud.
On Jan. 6, 2021, Young said he entered the U.S. Capitol with a group of fellow Oath Keepers with the aim of trying to disrupt proceedings to certify Biden's win.
"I felt it was like a Bastille time in history," he said, comparing the attack to the raid on the royal fortress in Paris to free opponents of the tyrannical Bourbon monarchy that helped to trigger the French Revolution.
Young's testimony was the latest evidence presented by federal prosecutors in the criminal trial against Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and his four co-defendants - Jessica Watkins, Thomas Caldwell, Kenneth Harrelson and Kelly Meggs.
The five are charged with multiple felonies, including seditious conspiracy, a rarely prosecuted crime under a statute dating to the Civil War era defined as attempting "to overthrow, put down or to destroy by force the government of the United States."
On Jan. 6, some of the group's members were among the thousands of pro-Trump supporters who surged into the Capitol, battling police and sending members of Congress and then Vice President Mike Pence scrambling for safety.
Prosecutors say the group planned and formed a "quick reaction force" of armed members who waited at a hotel in northern Virginia with a stash of firearms they could ferry across the Potomac River into the capital if called upon.
Lawyers for the defendants have argued they traveled to Washington on Jan. 6 to provide security for speakers at political rallies and had no plan to storm the Capitol by force.
Young is the second Oath Keeper member so far to testify for the government after pleading guilty, in the hopes of winning a reduced prison sentence. In June 2021, Young pleaded guilty to conspiracy and obstruction of justice charges.
He cried briefly on the stand as he discussed his plea on Monday, saying he hoped the U.S. government would recognize how sorry he is when he is later sentenced for his crimes.
Defense lawyers, however, sought to poke holes in his testimony.
“Forgive me, but in listening to you ... I haven’t heard you articulate an actual agreement with anybody to commit a crime,” Rhodes' attorney, James Lee Bright, said.
“I didn't explicitly say let's go commit a crime, but I thought it was implicit," Young replied.
"It was spontaneous?" Bright asked him again later during cross-examination.
"It was," Young replied.
(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Ross Colvin and Howard Goller)
Although Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado — a far-right MAGA Republican, QAnon sympathizer and conspiracy theorist — is often slammed as an extremist by her critics, she has a very good chance of being reelected on Tuesday, November 8. Democrats have generally been performing well in Colorado in recent years; President Joe Biden carried the state by around 14 percent in 2020. But Boebert is in one of Colorado’s most Republican congressional districts.
In a biting editorial published on October 29, the Denver Post’s editorial board lays out some reasons why it would love to see voters remove Boebert from office.
“We beg voters in western and southern Colorado not to give Rep. Lauren Boebert their vote,” the board writes. “Boebert has not represented (Colorado’s) 3rd Congressional District well. Almost exclusively, she has spent her time and efforts contributing to the toxic political environment in this nation…. Boebert’s unproductive approach, combined with the efforts of others, has helped erode Congress’ ability to honestly debate public policy that could help people in her district.”
The Post’s board goes on to argue that Adam Frisch, the Democratic congressional nominee who is trying to unseat Boebert, “would be a better representative for the people of the 3rd Congressional District.”
“Frisch, a business owner who worked for a time in finance both on Wall Street and internationally, can support oil and gas development in the district while also helping the Western Slope develop a less volatile industry base for companies like Leitner-Poma of America in Grand Junction, Osprey in Cortez, or the many backcountry hunting and fishing guides in Craig,” the Post’s editorial board writes. “Boebert, in contrast, is unable or perhaps unwilling to articulate any policy nuance on the extraction of oil and gas owned by taxpayers from our public lands. She has opposed every effort to protect public lands in the district and failed to disclose in a timely manner that her husband made almost $1 million as a consultant for the largest drilling company in the 3rd Congressional District’s Piceance Basin.”
Frisch, according to the board, has a lot more substance than Boebert and made that abundantly clear during their recent debate.
“Her performance at the Club 20 debate against Frisch was odd, to say the least, and she spent a good chunk of her speaking time talking about speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and criticizing the moderator,” the Post’s editorial board argues. “In her primary, Boebert called a man born and raised in Montrose County a groomer — a term for a gay man who sexually abuses children. The remark, directed at Don Coram, a conservative Republican and rancher whose son happens to be gay, is just one example of Boebert’s casual yet crass cruelty, which she puts on display on a daily basis while in Washington, D.C.”
The board continues, “Does she feel no remorse for this behavior? She told a joke, more than once, implying that a Muslim member of Congress was a terrorist bomber. She uses the derogatory term ‘jihad squad’ to reference other members of Congress. This is not what Western Colorado or Southern Colorado stands for.”
The board notes that Boebert has openly embraced the 3 Percenters, a far-right militia group.
“Members of the group have been implicated in several violent plots — a planned bombing of a mosque in Minnesota, an FBI-foiled bombing attempt of a bank in Oklahoma, and the kidnapping plot of Michigan’s governor,” the Post’s editorial board notes. “And, of course, the January 6, 2020, attempt to storm the U.S. Capitol and prevent Congress from seating the duly elected next president of the United States…. It is not too much to ask that Boebert distance herself from this group instead of making their calls for violence, including against the U.S. government, mainstream. She has refused to address the issue. We grieve that this is who represents our great state in Congress.
President Joe Biden's Department of Justice has filed a legal brief offering official backing for a lawsuit to stop voter intimidation at ballot dropboxes in Arizona.
In a 25-page court filing, Civil Rights Division Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said that the DOJ would back a lawsuit brought by the League of Women Voters of Arizona.
"This case alleges that organized and sometimes armed groups of individuals have engaged in campaigns to surveil, video record, and harass voters as they exercise their most fundamental right, the right to vote," the filing noted. "These allegations raise serious concerns of voter intimidation, which is proscribed under Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act."
According to the DOJ filing, the Voting Rights Act "does not require proof that a defendant caused a voter to refrain from casting a ballot or to vote contrary to their preferences."
"Although lawful poll-watching activities can support democratic transparency and accountability, when private citizens form 'ballot security forces' and attempt to take over the State's legitimate role of overseeing and policing elections, the risk of voter intimidation—and violating federal law—is significant," the document added.
Last week, a judge declined to bar a group of conservatives from watching ballot dropboxes in Arizona. The judge said that plaintiffs would have another opportunity to make their argument against the conservative activists.
A Michigan Republican is trotting his mother out to distract from the Donald Trump endorsement that helped him win a GOP primary and decades of online posting that threatens his chances in November's election.
John Gibbs knocked off incumbent Rep. Peter Meijer, who declared Joe Biden had legitimately won the 2020 election and voted to impeach Trump over the Jan. 6 insurrection, with the former president's backing and a half-million dollar ad investment from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, but internal polling from both parties show him trailing rival Hillary Scholten, reported Politico.
“He’s just an extreme of what’s happened to the Republican party. He’s an extreme example of it,” said Rep. Dan Kildee (D-MI). “Some of his past positions that he’s now trying to get himself away from don’t fit in the 21st century, let alone the 20th century in America.”
In addition to his recent election denialism and opposition to abortion, even in cases of rape or incest, Gibbs has floated QAnon conspiracy theories, questioned women's right to vote and wondered whether the lost city of Atlantis might be located beneath the North Pole.
“I like trolling a little bit, but I guess maybe I’m the first person in history who said something over the top in college,” Gibbs said. “They’re trying to take something someone said X number of years ago and make it seem like they’re a bad person.”
Gibbs also suggested in a 2007 blog post that the U.S. lacked the moral authority to criticize Saudi Arabia's treatment of women because, he said, American women have “widespread STDs” and millions “are on anti-depressants, are seeing therapists, and have low self-esteem,” and that same year he argued that British women were more attractive because they "seem less manly/aggressive than ours."
“People should look at me right now, look at reality, look at my staff, my campaign," Gibbs said. "Look at my mom and my videos."
Gibbs has enlisted his mother for campaign ads, where she brags about his honesty and humility, and appearances on the campaign trail, which the GOP candidate believes highlights his best qualities.
“We just wanted to show that side of me and show a fun quirky side,” he said. “People love that. Everywhere I go with my mom. I mean, everywhere when she’s here, people come up and say, ‘Oh I love your ad.’”
Scholten, however, said Gibbs had made his positions clear over the years, and his continuing belief that Biden's election was “mathematically impossible” shows that his views are outside the mainstream.
“What has he done to show that he does not believe that?” Scholten said. “Why should we take this man’s word for it when he’s been so willing to lie about the results of the 2020 election? He’s got a lot of work to do rehabilitating himself with women."
Former Oath Keeper and convicted Capitol rioter Graydon Young on Monday testified in a federal court that he helped provide security to Trump ally Roger Stone ahead of the January 6th Capitol riots -- but quickly grew disillusioned with him.
According to NBC News reporter Ryan Reilly, Young described his work with the Oath Keepers after he became radicalized by social media posts in the wake of former President Donald Trump's loss to President Joe Biden.
"Unfortunately I was spending way too much time on YouTube and Facebook," Young said of his actions after the election. "I thought there was better than a 50-50 chance that there was fraud... I got really ginned up... That really started to cloud my judgment."
Young said he was initially excited to meet Stone based on his reputation as a hard-nose pro-Trump political operative, but that "I wasn't really impressed, to be honest, with Roger Stone" after meeting him.
Politico's Kyle Cheney adds that Young said that Stone tried to make himself out to be more important than he really was.
"I don't think he has any political power," he told the court. "He thinks he does."
In a blunt-talking editorial from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the editors took two of the most conservative members of the Supreme Court to task for doing little to halt the slide in the court's credibility that has been in freefall after it became a 6-3 conservative majority.
Specifically, they cited Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito over a Thomas ruling last week, and a report on Alito dating back to his confirmation in 2005.
In the case of Thomas, last week he interceded on behalf of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who is balking at having to testify in an election corruption case in Georgia related to Trump's phone call to Georgia's secretary of state.
Regarding his ruling temporarily granting Graham relief, the editors wrote, "... as with anything regarding that election, having Thomas involved in any way automatically looks suspect because of his wife, right-wing activist Ginni Thomas. In the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, Ginni Thomas flooded Trump’s inner circle with unhinged texts calling Joe Biden’s election a 'coup,' suggesting the Biden 'crime family' should face 'military tribunals for sedition,' and generally encouraging resistance to accepting the election outcome."
The editors added, "In what universe is it OK for Justice Thomas not to recuse himself from anything Jan. 6-related when this is the kind of pillow talk he goes home to at night?"
As for Alito, he was scorched for lying his way onto the court that led to his Dobbs's majority decision that gutted Roe v. Wade 17 years later.
With the New York Times reporting that Alito had assured Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) that he had no intention of overturning Roe, saying, "I am a believer in precedents. People would find I adhere to that,” the Post-Dispatch editors slammed him for his "mendacity."
"That mendacity is hardly a surprise, nor is Alito alone in it," they wrote. "All five conservative justices who voted in June to overturn Roe (Roberts concurred, but stopped short of endorsing full reversal) have at various times waxed on about the sanctity of precedent generally — and have, to varying degrees, offered assurance they weren’t going to go out of their way to flip Roe as soon as they had the votes to do it. Which, of course, is exactly what they did."
The editors also took a shot at Chief Justice John Roberts for acting like he doesn't understand why the court he heads has lost the confidence of the public.
With Roberts complaining, "I don't understand the connection between (Supreme Court) opinions that people disagree with and the legitimacy of the Court," the editors explained, "As we noted then, his frustration is misplaced. These latest developments further illustrate why."
On a Saturday in late March, the woman who runs elections in the rural hills of Surry County, North Carolina, was pulling another weekend shift preparing for the upcoming primary, when she began to hear on the other side of her wall the thunder of impassioned speeches. She was dismayed that the voices were questioning the election she’d overseen in 2020 and implying that corrupted voting machines had helped steal it. She also believed it was no coincidence that the Surry County GOP convention — the highlight of which was a lecture from a nationally prominent proponent of the stolen-election myth — was taking place in a public meeting room right next to her office.
The elections director, 47-year-old Michella Huff, who’d lived in the county since high school and knew many voters by name, considered it ludicrous that anyone could think the election had been rigged in Surry County. Donald Trump had received upward of 70% of the roughly 36,000 votes cast. Huff, a registered Republican for most of her adult life, had personally certified the vote.
Yet people had begun approaching Huff in church recently, saying things like, “I know you didn’t do anything, but that election was stolen.” In February, a longtime acquaintance of Huff’s cornered her in a bluegrass music store and berated her with complaints rooted in conspiracy theories. Huff started limiting her trips to town, even doing her grocery order online. “I didn’t want to have to deal with that,” she said of the election backlash. But it was hard to live in partial hiding. “I’m not that kind of person. I’m a people person.”
Unbeknownst to Huff, a national network of election deniers had been making inroads in Surry County, on the fringe of Appalachia. In early 2022, several members of the Surry County GOP had attended a training, put on by North Carolina Audit Force, which describes itself as a group that forms grassroots coalitions to “reveal election irregularities.” There, they were taught to “canvass” for election fraud by door-knocking to check for inaccuracies in public records, such as if a different person lived at an address than was listed on voter rolls. Discrepancies, canvassers claim, can indicate fraud — though experts say that canvassers often misinterpret normal imperfections in difficult-to-maintain voter lists, such as someone failing to update their address when moving. By early March, canvassers were crisscrossing Surry County, following “walk books” put together by data analysts associated with North Carolina Audit Force, who mapped routes for efficiency.
The featured lecturer at the Surry County GOP convention, Douglas Frank, is the face of the nationwide canvassing movement and claims to have established campaigns with the help of “supermoms” in at least 40 states. Frank and other speakers spent hours at the convention blaming corrupted voting machines and collusion among Democrats, Big Tech and nefarious forces for stealing the election. The assembly ultimately passed resolutions to create an election integrity task force and push for an audit, tactics espoused by Trump supporters.
The following Monday morning, Frank showed up at the service window of Huff’s office with William Keith Senter, the new chair of the Surry County GOP, and a woman who signed the guestbook as “NC Audit Force.” Huff believed that the group wanted to get inside her office — where voting equipment was kept — so she stepped into the cramped lobby with them, letting the door to her office automatically lock behind her.
The bowtie-wearing Frank began complaining to Huff about “phantom voters” discovered through canvassing and declaring that if he could just take an electromagnetic field meter tool to her DS200 ballot tabulators, he could reveal a minuscule modem that had helped switch votes from Trump to Joe Biden. It wasn’t the first time that Frank had encouraged an election official to let outsiders access election equipment. About 11 months before, he’d offered to help bring in a “team” to “audit” machines for Colorado officials, according to an affidavit for an arrest warrant of an official charged in the incident and to Frank himself. In September, Frank posted on Telegram that his phone had been seized by FBI agents investigating the incident, according to The Washington Post. Frank has not been charged.
“My objective is to help the clerk understand how they’re being hacked and what they need to do to fix it,” Frank said when asked about Colorado, using another term for election officials. In reference to Huff, he said: “I was there trying to offer a service to the clerk. I always assume clerks want to have clean elections, which is why I offered to help her find out if her machines were online or not.” Frank claimed to have convinced “dozens” of other election and county-level officials of the need to probe voting machines, “and that’s why counties all across the country are taking the machines out of the election process.”
It was not Frank who most concerned Huff, however, but Senter — a high school auto shop teacher and cattle farmer with a mechanic’s callused hands and baseball hat declaring “Pray for America” atop his silvering hair. The new GOP chair — who, according to three members of the Surry County GOP, replaced a predecessor who hadn’t sufficiently backed claims of election fraud — would remain in Huff’s orbit long after the barnstorming Frank left town. Indeed, Senter was only at the beginning of a campaign that would include efforts to drastically cut Huff’s pay and call into question even the most mundane functions of her office.
Huff told ProPublica that, as the men pressured her for more than an hour, Senter threatened that she should comply with their demands or the county commission would fire her. (She initially described this incident in an article by Reuters.) She feared that her reddening face and neck gave away her fear. (The commission has no authority to fire Huff; she is appointed by and answers to the county and state boards of elections. Senter denied threatening Huff’s job and wrote to ProPublica that “I speak loudly because I do not hear well. I drove a loud race car for years and have shot high powered rifles all of my life, so I have high frequency hearing loss.” Frank said that descriptions of Senter as threatening were “overblown,” and that “he might have been emphatic, but never, like, threatening.”)
But Huff refused to give in.
Huff is hardly the only election official struggling to stand up to those who believe the voting system is rigged; such confrontations have dramatically unfolded across the country, from Hood County, Texas, to Floyd County, Georgia, to Nye County, Nevada. Her circumstances illustrate how the efforts to target her are part of a larger playbook, with tactics that are replicated throughout the country.
“Election officials in small rural offices are absolutely more vulnerable,” said Paul Manson, who studies the demography of election officials and serves as the research director for the Elections & Voting Information Center at Reed College. Because such offices have fewer resources, Manson said, they have a harder time adapting to the increasingly controversial nature of election administration in the United States. These types of offices also represent the vast majority of the nation’s roughly 10,000 election jurisdictions, according to Manson’s research, with 48% of offices staffed by only one or two people and an additional 40% having between two and five. (Huff’s office has four full-time staff members, including her.)
As she juggled budget challenges and harassment, Huff has sought help from the North Carolina State Board of Elections, but that agency has faced struggles of its own. The GOP-dominant legislature has deprived the board of federal funding it had intended to use to hire and retain staff, instead sending it directly to counties. Moreover, groups claiming election fraud have organized campaigns against the agency, leaving it straining to support the 100 far-flung county boards of elections it oversees, officials say.
Laws and regulations were not written for the hostile environment of today, said Richard L. Hasen, a professor and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. Many of the individuals challenging election officials are even using the law itself, such as overwhelming those offices with public records requests, a practice that Senter would soon take up in Surry County and that “election integrity” groups would employ against the North Carolina State Board of Elections.
Hasen warned: “The country’s election infrastructure isn’t designed to stand up to one of its two major parties turning against it.”
When Michella Huff accepted the job as Surry County’s elections director in 2019, she thought she knew what she was getting into. On her first day, in October, she parked at a strip mall neighbored by corn fields, a hunting supply store and a chicken processing plant, and walked into a former grocery store, which had closed as the region bled jobs and had been renovated to house the county’s tax, agricultural and elections divisions. After more than two decades as the head of groundskeeping for Mount Airy, population roughly 10,500 and the largest town in the county, located about 100 miles north of Charlotte, she was giving her aching back a rest and working in an air-conditioned office.
Each fall, for most of her adult life, she’d taken a few weeks off from mowing and planting to be a poll worker during early voting and then run a polling site as a chief precinct judge on Election Day. Though the days could be long and the pay little, she loved how some people kept their “I Voted” stickers pristine to add to lifetime collections and how others brought in homemade grape jelly for poll workers. Most of all, she was motivated by the certainty that she was making American democracy function.
After the 2020 presidential election went off smoothly, Huff was aware of the “Stop the Steal” movement promoted by Trump, but, given her knowledge of how election security worked, she knew that its claims of Venezuelan software flipping votes from Trump to Biden were baseless. In the aftermath of Jan. 6, she assured herself that that kind of chaos would never come to sleepy Surry County.
But instead of the conspiracy theories dying down, they intensified. Soon after taking the job, she had switched her party status to independent “to reflect the way that this office must be portrayed in a nonpartisan manner.” It wasn’t until Biden took office that people in the community began to ask her about this. Huff recalls that one afternoon in early March 2021, she was surprised by a visitor at her office: Kevin Shinault, her former elementary school teacher and a GOP precinct chair, who she said accused her of participating in a debunked conspiracy theory known as “Zuckerbucks.”
In 2020, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had provided grants to election officials through the Center for Tech and Civic Life to help with unexpected pandemic expenses, and critics held that this had been part of a plot to throw the election to Joe Biden. Huff happily explained that the $48,584 she’d received from the group had been used for straightforward expenses, like hiring a Spanish-language interpreter. Nearly every election office in North Carolina had accepted such grants. Shinault, however, argued that hiring a Spanish-language interpreter had nefariously boosted Hispanic participation to the Democrats’ advantage. Huff assured him that helping Spanish-speaking voters wasn’t partisan. (Shinault did not respond to requests for comment.)
That night, Huff attended the biweekly county commissioners meeting, at which the chair of the county Elections Board asked the five county commissioners to split $20,000 left over from the previous year’s federal grants between Huff and her staff as belated hazard pay for their efforts during the pandemic. Huff figured it was a routine request. Numerous other counties had used the money this way; Surry’s bipartisan Elections Board had already signed off on it; and records show that about two months earlier, commissioners had reviewed the grants without comment.
The county commissioners, however, sharply questioned the chair of the Elections Board for nearly an hour, implying that unless more county employees got such pay, it wasn’t fair. Eddie Harris, a commissioner who works at a luxury saddle-making company his family owns, declared, “I will never take one penny from Mark Zuckerberg or any of his ilk,” calling the Meta CEO “a left-wing radical extremist bigot.” (Senter wrote to ProPublica, “As a party, we approached the commissioners and ask [sic] them to send the Zuckerbucks back, and they agreed.” Harris did not respond to requests for comment.)
Huff realized that her decadeslong relationships with people wouldn’t prevent them from envisioning her as part of some dark conspiracy. The next month, the commissioners unanimously voted to return nearly $100,000 in pandemic grant money, including the Center for Tech and Civic Life grant and around $60,000 from the USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy, named for the former Republican governor of California. They also returned the $20,000 in federal funding, rather than divvying it up among the elections staff.
Huff felt that returning the money was “very unfair,” but she resolved not to let it affect her performance. The best way to rebut conspiracy theories was to run her elections perfectly. She hoped the election conspiracy theories “would be a dead issue after the money was sent back.”
But once Senter and Frank confronted her in March 2022, she realized the target on her back was permanent.
After that heated visit, Senter kept showing up at the elections office. With the service window between them, Huff helped him file public records requests, which he insisted on scrawling by hand. (He explained to ProPublica that the handwritten requests were necessary, “so they could not be doctored by anyone else.”) Huff politely did her duty, but whenever she saw him, “My gut flipped. It makes me angry that he has that power — I can’t help how my body reacts.” When Huff and her staff finished work late in the evening, police escorted them to their cars, past campaign-style signs that Senter had put up reading “The People’s Trust is SHATTERED” and “We DEMAND a Full FORENSIC Audit.” Huff repeatedly took them down, until the sheriff decided the signs should stay up, as they were legal political expression on public property.
In March and April, Senter sent numerous emails and texts to the county commissioners, which ProPublica obtained through public records requests. On March 31, he emailed the commissioners asking them to “please consider our recommendations that are in the attachment,” which included a suggestion to reduce her pay and stated that “there is NO requirement to fund any additional election support staff.” Though Huff answers to the county and state elections boards, the county commissioners set her budget and salary.
Later that day, Senter texted the commissioners, “Y’all might better get Michella in check,” complaining about her charging 5 cents per copy for public records. “It’s gonna get ugly if she don’t jump on board. Cut her salary to 12 bucks an hour like the law says you can do.” (Senter told ProPublica: “The ugly part is in reference to the phone calls, text, threats and pressure I was receiving due to her lies and deceit that she reported to the media”; but his message to the commissioners made no reference to those things, and Huff said she had not spoken to the media about Senter as of the end of March.)
North Carolina law does specify that elections directors can be paid a minimum of $12 an hour (less than $25,000 annually), but two lawyers specializing in elections told ProPublica that any attempt to drastically reduce Huff’s salary, which was $71,000 as of March, would almost certainly be struck down, as courts have found that elections director salaries must be in line with those of their peers; a ProPublica review of elections director salaries in North Carolina found that the average is about $61,000.
Commissioners responded only occasionally to Senter’s messages about Huff, according to the documents ProPublica received from public records requests, such as the commission chair texting Senter instructions for how to avoid paying for public information requests to Huff’s office. (Only one of the county commissioners responded to a request for comment. Mark Marion said, “We have signified that we are behind our elections department.” When pressed for specific instances, he pointed to “our day-to-day conversations and visits” with elections staff.)
At an April 18 commissioners meeting, Senter asked the panel during the public comment period to consider not using the county’s voting machines in the upcoming May primary because of his and others’ suspicions that they had been corrupted. He was backed by a parade of speakers, among them Shinault.
At a commissioners meeting the following month, the room was filled, with the overflow watching on a livestream. Essentially, the whole meeting was given over to election deniers, some of whom traveled from elsewhere in North Carolina and the nation and presented slideshows on the vulnerabilities of voting machines and the so-called evidence from canvassing efforts.
Near the end of the meeting, a commissioner read prewritten remarks explaining that the requests to discard the voting machines were outside their power.
Afterward, the crowd assembled on the courthouse lawn, alongside a memorial to Confederate soldiers. People chanted, “Hell no, the machines gotta go!” A succession of speakers promised to fight on, with one declaiming so vehemently that he tore his lips on the microphone mesh, spotting it with blood.
In late August, Senter traveled to Missouri for a weekendlong gathering of hundreds of election deniers put on by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who claims to have spent at least $35 million of his fortune on efforts to prove the 2020 election was fraudulent. At Lindell’s event, activists from all 50 states touted their campaigns, which often involved pressuring county and state election officials. “We’ve had a few victories,” Senter told the crowd when he presented as the representative for North Carolina. “We feel like if you’ve got a committed group of patriots, and some county commissioners that are not afraid to face the establishment and do their job, and local law enforcement that will hear the evidence that you produce to them, we can actually get something done in your county. So if you’d like that strategy, hit us up in North Carolina, and we’ll help you out with it.”
After returning home, Senter submitted to Huff’s office a time-consuming public records request similar to one that Lindell had promoted, which required one of Huff’s three full-time staff members to spend 60 hours at a scanner uploading 2020 “poll tapes,” the physical receipts from tabulators. Across North Carolina and nationwide, short-staffed offices reported being overwhelmed with often identical requests. Senter’s requests to Huff came atop dozens of others from different sources, including a sweeping request from a lawyer for the Republican National Committee. Before 2020, Surry County’s elections office had received an estimated half-dozen public records requests a year; in the first 10 months of 2022, it received 81.
An ally of Senter’s filed requests for court-ordered mediation and a lawsuit against Huff, seeking the same records that Lindell’s campaign has recommended asking for. While none of the legal actions have so far been successful, shortly before Surry County’s 2020 elections-related paper records were to be routinely discarded, the county Board of Elections agreed to preserve them for three more years. Huff said that each legal action resulted in her and her staff having to spend significant time with lawyers and on paperwork, rather than on actual elections administration.
Most laws and regulations that govern public records requests and elections do little to ease the disruptions that Huff and others were enduring — and offer few means to hold anyone accountable. “I don’t think there’s a silver bullet solution, unfortunately,” said Lawrence Norden, the senior director of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit law and public policy institute. He noted that public records laws are necessary tools to ensure government transparency. “In a lot of cases, if election officials had more resources available to them, it would be easier to push back on some of these things.” He said that officials in smaller jurisdictions often need to turn to professional associations, nonprofits or their state election agencies for help.
The organization most responsible for supporting Huff is the North Carolina State Board of Elections, which is responsible for statewide election infrastructure, such as its voter registration database, and which provides oversight and help for county offices. It had dispatched staff to back up Huff when election deniers were holding rallies in the county and offered legal advice and support over the phone.
But the state board, too, was being overwhelmed by public information requests. Before 2020, only several dozen requests would come in per year, said Patrick Gannon, its public information director. In 2021, there were 380, with some coming from the same people who submitted requests to Huff. Meanwhile, the number of people on the communications team had dwindled from four to two, in large part due to reductions in federal funding and the GOP-led legislature not meeting budgeting requests, according to board officials. By late October, the officials said, five employees had accepted buyout offers. To make payroll, the agency also let two people go and did not fill 17 positions — reducing its staff by more than 20% during its busiest time and limiting the services it could provide counties.
Huff’s experiences with so-called election integrity activists were more intense than what other North Carolina election workers were facing, though many of them were also enduring their own challenges. After the May primary, at least 14 counties reported complaints to the state board about aggressive poll observers, according to an internal survey obtained through a public records request. The complaints and additional documentation from one of the counties described two instances in which observers tailed election workers in their cars, among other examples of observers “intimidating poll workers.” This led the agency to pass rules to ensure that observers — the individuals assigned by political parties to monitor election officials — didn’t do things like stand so close to voting equipment that they could see confidential information. However, these rules were nullified when they were sent for approval to a board appointed by the GOP-controlled state legislature.
Even states considered to be on the forefront of election administration — such as Colorado, where legislators have passed laws addressing rising security risks, and Kentucky, where the Republican secretary of state has pushed back against conspiracy theories — have experienced significant disruptions as a result of the organized campaigns by 2020 election deniers. “It’s the new normal, until we have our political leaders in both parties pushing back strongly against it,” Norden said.
One of the individuals helping Senter in his Surry County campaign is Carol Snow, the North Carolina Audit Force leader who accompanied Senter and Frank to the elections office during their March confrontation with Huff. In a May email from Snow to Senter with the subject line “Surry Co Dirt,” which ProPublica obtained through public records requests, she provides him with a PowerPoint presentation. Its 61 slides outline supposed errors in North Carolina’s voter registration database. In an August email Snow sent to the county commissioners, copying Senter, she presented them with supposed evidence of voter-registration fraud in Surry County assembled through canvassing. She also suggested that law enforcement could subpoena information inaccessible through public records requests, which she claimed might reveal “individual voter fraud” or systemwide “election fraud.” She concluded, “We will get to the bottom of this or die (or be imprisoned for) trying.” The commissioners did not respond to the email.
(Snow declined to comment on the emails; in response to earlier questions about North Carolina Audit Force’s efforts in Surry County, Snow wrote: “Americans have every right to oversee our election process. That’s what should happen in a free society.”)
Until recently, Snow was also a leader in the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, a statewide affiliate of the nationwide Election Integrity Network, which has trained thousands of activists in the battleground states to scrutinize election officials. The network’s goal is to make sure there are “local election integrity task forces organized at every local election office in America,” according to its training manual, and it lays out how to aggressively scrutinize officials in ways that are similar to what Huff has experienced, such as through filing public records requests and investigating voting machines and voter lists. “The goal is for the task force members to be ever-present at the election office and board meetings,” it reads.
Jim Womack, the head of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, told ProPublica that the group had nothing to do with the events in Surry County and that Snow’s actions there were “her business.” He and Snow said she had recently left the organization.
Womack estimated that as of August, the North Carolina Election Integrity Team had trained more than 1,000 volunteers, who would be present in most major North Carolina counties in November, including Surry. “As long as” election officials are “doing things in accordance with the law and the books, they shouldn’t have anything to worry about,” Womack said. “And if that causes stress, I'm sorry.”
In the months before the November 2022 midterm election, Huff decided to go on the offensive against misinformation, giving speeches to various civic groups about how elections actually work, like the local real estate agents association.
One afternoon toward the end of the summer, she showed up at a country club for what she had believed was a concerned citizens meeting — and found waiting for her eight local conservative leaders, including county commissioner Harris, who had fiercely criticized the Center for Tech and Civic Life money. For two and a half hours, Huff answered the Republicans’ questions, largely about election security, explaining the safeguards that kept voting tabulators from being hacked. The discussion was tense but civil, and while Huff kept her hands clasped atop a table, her feet compulsively kicked an orange golf tee beneath it. As Huff headed for the door, she reminded her hosts, “The people who work in the elections office, we’re real people who love our community too.”
Afterward, a ProPublica reporter asked an attendee, Earl Blackburn, a Republican candidate for a local school board, if Huff’s presentation had made him feel better about election security. Though Huff had taken more than 15 minutes to explain directly to Blackburn how the voting machines couldn’t be hacked, he said, “I don’t know that she has satisfactorily answered my question.” To explain how the machines could be hacked anyway, Blackburn referenced a badly reviewedSean Connery heist movie that hinges on thieves dodging a laser beam alarm system to break into a global bank.
On Sept. 19, Huff hosted a watch party in the public meeting room next to the elections office for a livestream of speeches in which experts and North Carolina State Board of Elections members explained election security, hoping that some of the Surry County GOP might attend — or at the very least some skeptical citizens. But the only people who came were longtime poll workers who already understood how elections worked.
As September turned to October, she and her staff hosted another event at which they publicly tested the dozens of voting machines that would be used in November to prove their accuracy. She hoped some of the election deniers might assuage their fears at the event, but none showed up.
No matter how many questions she answered or how many times she proved the soundness of the voting machines, it wasn’t clear that she was convincing anyone.
When Huff had taken the job in 2019, she had told the Board of Elections that she expected to stay 20 years. But recently there had been many nights she had wondered how she could continue. She said, “If this is what every day and every night looks like, how could anyone keep this up for 17 more years?” She wasn’t just thinking of herself but also about how the stress she brought home and the controversies surrounding her would affect her children, who are in high school and college, and her husband.
Coming home late from work each night, Huff parked beside a plot that was normally filled with heirloom tomatoes, cucumbers, herbs and peppers, but which was now just dirt. Instead of tending her garden, she was trapped all day in the halogen-lit office. Still, in her most hopeful moods, she could imagine that instead of cultivating the land she was cultivating democracy. “It’s a seed. You plant it. It grows. It flowers. It fruits,” she said. “It takes careful tending to make sure that it survives and becomes something beautiful.”
Mehmet Oz has tried to keep his distance from Donald Trump's election lies, but the Pennsylvania Republican's campaign team is stocked with staffers who attended the "Stop the Steal" rally that preceded the Jan. 6 insurrection.
At least two Oz staffers -- Lee Snover, his campaign coordinator for Northampton County, and Josh Bashline, a paid political adviser -- attended the infamous Donald Trump rally at the White House Ellipse, where he declared the 2020 election had been stolen and urged his supporters to "fight like hell" to overturn his loss, reported Rolling Stone.
Snover, her county's GOP chair, participated in a Zoom call four days before the insurrection with hundreds of state legislators from states where Trump's allies were working to "decertify" Joe Biden's election win, and she expressed support in a talk-radio appearance two days later for pressuring Mike Pence to reject those electors.
“That’s why we need the state legislators to do it," Snover said Jan. 4, 2021. "The secretaries of state are never going to change it.”
Oz has publicly stated that he wouldn't have objected to Biden electors, as Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley did, but he and his chief advisers have been forced to reassure Republican allies that he's not an election denier.
“[Oz] doesn’t deny the results of the election," Oz consultant Larry Weitzner wrote to conservative Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who expressed concern about his position on the 2020 election. "Says we need to learn from it and make changes in how the elections are run. In [Pennsylvania] it was totally screwed up with unmanned drop boxes and paper ballots sent to millions of voters many of who had not voted in years and did not ask for them.”
This article is co-published with ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.
Also, sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.
Six days before a local runoff election last year in Frisco, a prosperous and growing suburb of Dallas, Brandon Burden paced the stage of KingdomLife Church. The pastor told congregants that demonic spirits were operating through members of the City Council.
Grasping his Bible with both hands, Burden said God was working through his North Texas congregation to take the country back to its Christian roots. He lamented that he lacked jurisdiction over the state Capitol, where he had gone during the 2021 Texas legislative session to lobby for conservative priorities like expanded gun rights and a ban on abortion.
“But you know what I got jurisdiction over this morning is an election coming up on Saturday,” Burden told parishioners. “I got a candidate that God wants to win. I got a mayor that God wants to unseat. God wants to undo. God wants to shift the balance of power in our city. And I have jurisdiction over that this morning.”
What Burden said that day in May 2021 was a violation of a long-standing federal law barring churches and nonprofits from directly or indirectly participating in political campaigns, tax law experts told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Although the provision was mostly uncontroversial for decades after it passed in 1954, it has become a target for both evangelical churches and former President Donald Trump, who vowed to eliminate it.
Burden’s sermon is among those at 18 churches identified by the news organizations over the past two years that appeared to violate the Johnson Amendment, a measure named after its author, former President Lyndon B. Johnson. Some pastors have gone so far as to paint candidates they oppose as demonic.
At one point, churches fretted over losing their tax-exempt status for even unintentional missteps. But the IRS has largely abdicated its enforcement responsibilities as churches have become more brazen. In fact, the number of apparent violations found by ProPublica and the Tribune, and confirmed by three nonprofit tax law experts, is greater than the total number of churches the federal agency has investigated for intervening in political campaigns over the past decade, according to records obtained by the news organizations.
In response to questions, an IRS spokesperson said that the agency “cannot comment on, neither confirm nor deny, investigations in progress, completed in the past nor contemplated.” Asked about enforcement efforts over the past decade, the IRS pointed the news organizations to annual reports that do not contain such information.
Neither Burden nor KingdomLife responded to multiple interview requests or to emailed questions.
Credit: Video editing by Todd Wiseman/Texas Tribune and Justin Dehn/Texas Tribune. Source videos: Shelby Tauber for ProPublica/Texas Tribune, KingdomLife Church.
Trump’s opposition to the law banning political activity by nonprofits “has given some politically-minded evangelical leaders a sense that the Johnson Amendment just isn’t really an issue anymore, and that they can go ahead and campaign for or against candidates or positions from the pulpit,” said David Brockman, a scholar in religion and public policy at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.
Among the violations the newsrooms identified: In January, an Alaska pastor told his congregation that he was voting for a GOP candidate who is aiming to unseat Republican U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, saying the challenger was the “only candidate for Senate that can flat-out preach.” During a May 15 sermon, a pastor in Rocklin, California, asked voters to get behind “a Christian conservative candidate” challenging Gov. Gavin Newsom. And in July, a New Mexico pastor called Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham “beyond evil” and “demonic” for supporting abortion access. He urged congregants to “vote her behind right out of office” and challenged the media to call him out for violating the Johnson Amendment.
Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist at the University of Indiana-Purdue, who studies Christian nationalism, said the ramping up of political activity by churches could further polarize the country. “It creates hurdles for a healthy, functioning, pluralistic democratic society,” he said. “It’s really hard to overcome.”
The Johnson Amendment does not prohibit churches from inviting political speakers or discussing positions that may seem partisan nor does it restrict voters from making faith-based decisions on who should represent them. But because donations to churches are tax-deductible and because churches don’t have to file financial disclosures with the IRS, without such a rule donors seeking to influence elections could go undetected, said Andrew Seidel, vice president of strategic communications for the advocacy group Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
“If you pair the ability to wade into partisan politics with a total absence of financial oversight and transparency, you’re essentially creating super PACs that are black holes,” Seidel said.
Churches have long balanced the tightrope of political involvement, and blatant violations have previously been rare. In the 1960s, the IRS investigated complaints that some churches abused their tax-exempt status by distributing literature that was hostile to the election of John F. Kennedy, the country’s first Catholic president. And in 2004, the federal agency audited All Saints Episcopal Church in California after a pastor gave an anti-war speech that imagined Jesus talking to presidential candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry. The pastor did not endorse a candidate but criticized the Iraq war.
Some conservative groups have argued that Black churches are more politically active than their white evangelical counterparts but are not as heavily scrutinized. During the 1984 presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Rev. Jesse L. Jackson was accused of turning Sunday sermons into campaign rallies and using Black churches to raise funds. In response to allegations of illegal campaigning, Jackson said at the time that strict guidelines were followed and denied violating the law.
While some Black churches have crossed the line into political endorsements, the long legacy of political activism in these churches stands in sharp contrast to white evangelical churches, where some pastors argue devout Christians must take control of government positions, said Robert Wuthnow, the former director of the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion.
Wuthnow said long-standing voter outreach efforts inside Black churches, such as Souls to the Polls, which encourages voting on Sundays after church services, largely stay within the boundaries of the law.
“The Black church has been so keenly aware of its marginalized position,” Wuthnow said. “The Black church, historically, was the one place where Black people could mobilize, could organize, could feel that they had some power at the local level. The white evangelical church has power. It’s in office. It’s always had power.”
At the end of his two-hour sermon that May, Burden asserted that his church had a God-given power to choose lawmakers, and he asked others to join him onstage to “secure the gate over the city.”
Burden and a handful of church members crouched down and held on to a rod, at times speaking in tongues. The pastor said intruders such as the mayor, who was not up for reelection last year but who supported one of the candidates in the race for City Council, would be denied access to the gates of the city.
“Now this is bold, but I’m going to say it because I felt it from the Lord. I felt the Lord say, ‘Revoke the mayor’s keys to this gate,’” Burden said. “No more do you have the key to the city. We revoke your key this morning, Mr. Mayor.
“We shut you out of the place of power,” Burden added. “The place of authority and influence.”
Johnson Amendment’s Cold War roots
Questions about the political involvement of tax-exempt organizations were swirling when Congress ordered an investigation in April 1952 to determine if some foundations were using their money “for un-American and subversive activities.”
Leading the probe was Rep. Gene Cox, a Georgia Democrat who had accused the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, among others, of helping alleged Communists or Communist fronts. Cox died during the investigation, and the final report cleared the foundations of wrongdoing.
But a Republican member of the committee argued for additional scrutiny, and in July 1953, Congress established the House Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations. The committee focused heavily on liberal organizations, but it also investigated nonprofits such as the Facts Forum foundation, which was headed by Texas oilman H.L. Hunt, an ardent supporter of then-Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, a Republican who was best known for holding hearings to investigate suspected Communists.
In July 1954, Johnson, who was then a senator, proposed an amendment to the U.S. tax code that would strip nonprofits of their tax-exempt status for “intervening” in political campaigns. The amendment sailed through Congress with bipartisan support and was signed into law by Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Johnson never explained his intent. Opponents of the amendment, as well as some academics, say Johnson was motivated by a desire to undercut conservative foundations such as the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government, founded by newspaper magnate Frank Gannett, which painted the Democrat as soft on communism and supported his opponent in the primary election. Others have hypothesized that Johnson was hoping to head off a wider crackdown on nonprofit foundations.
Over the next 40 years, the IRS stripped a handful of religious nonprofits of their tax-exempt status. None were churches.
Then, just four days before the 1992 presidential election, Branch Ministries in New York ran two full-page ads in USA Today and The Washington Times urging voters to reject then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, a Democrat, in his challenge to Republican President George H.W. Bush.
The ads proclaimed: “Christian Beware. Do not put the economy ahead of the Ten Commandments.” They asserted that Clinton violated scripture by supporting “abortion on demand,” homosexuality and the distribution of condoms to teenagers in public schools. Clinton, the ads said, was “openly promoting policies that are in rebellion to God’s laws.”
Citing an increase in allegations of church political activity leading up to the 2004 presidential election between incumbent Bush and Kerry, IRS officials created the Political Activities Compliance Initiative to fast-track investigations.
Over the next four years, the committee investigated scores of churches, including 80 for endorsing candidates from the pulpit, according to IRS reports. But it did not revoke the tax-exempt status of any. Instead, the IRS mostly sent warning letters that agency officials said were effective in dissuading churches from continuing their political activity, asserting that there were no repeat offenders in that period.
In some cases, the IRS initiated audits of churches that could have led to financial penalties. It’s unclear how many did.
In January 2009, a federal court dismissed an audit into alleged financial improprieties at a Minnesota church whose pastor had supported the congressional campaign of former U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota.
The court found that the IRS had not been following its own rules for a decade because it was tasked with notifying churches of their legal rights before any pending audits and was required to have an appropriately high-level official sign off on them. But a 1998 agency reorganization had eliminated the position, leaving lower IRS employees to initiate church investigations.
During the hiatus, a conservative Christian initiative called Pulpit Freedom Sunday flourished. Pastors recorded themselves endorsing candidates or giving political sermons that they believed violated the Johnson Amendment and sent them to the IRS. The goal, according to participants, was to trigger a lawsuit that would lead to the prohibition being ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The IRS never challenged participating churches, and the effort wound down without achieving its aim.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from ProPublica and the Tribune last year, the IRS produced a severely redacted spreadsheet indicating the agency had launched inquiries into 16 churches since 2011. IRS officials shielded the results of the probes, and they have declined to answer specific questions.
Despite the agency’s limited enforcement, Trump promised shortly after he took office that he would “totally destroy the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution.”
As president, Trump tried unsuccessfully to remove the restrictions on church politicking through a 2017 executive order. The move was largely symbolic because it simply ordered the government not to punish churches differently than it would any other nonprofit, according to a legal filing by the Justice Department.
Eliminating the Johnson Amendment would require congressional or judicial action.
Although the IRS has not discussed its plans, it has taken procedural steps that would enable it to ramp up audits again if it chooses to.
In 2019, more than two decades after eliminating the high-level position needed to sign off on action against churches, the IRS designated the commissioner of the agency’s tax-exempt and government entities division as the “appropriate high-level Treasury official” with the power to initiate a church audit.
But Philip Hackney, a former IRS attorney and University of Pittsburgh tax law professor, said he doesn’t read too much into that. “I don’t see any reason to believe that the operation of the IRS has changed significantly.”
The pulpit and politics
There is no uniform way to monitor church sermons across the country. But with the COVID-19 pandemic, many churches now post their services online, and ProPublica and the Tribune reviewed dozens of them. Many readers shared sermons with us. (You can do so here.)
Texas’ large evangelical population and history of activism in Black churches makes the state a focal point for debates over political activity, said Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
“Combine all of that with the increasing competitiveness of Texas elections, and it’s no surprise that more and more Texas churches are taking on a political role,” he said. “Texas is a perfect arena for widespread, religiously motivated political activism.”
The state also has a long history of politically minded pastors, Wuthnow said. Texas evangelical church leaders joined the fight in support of alcohol prohibition a century ago and spearheaded efforts to defeat Democrat Al Smith, the first Catholic to be nominated for president by a major party, in 1928. In the 1940s, evangelical fundamentalism began to grow in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Today, North Texas remains home to influential pastors such as Robert Jeffress, who leads the First Baptist megachurch in Dallas. Jeffress was one of Trump’s most fervent supporters, appearing at campaign events, defending him on television news shows and stating that he “absolutely” did not regret supporting the former president after the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.
Burden went a step further, urging followers to stock up on food and keep their guns loaded ahead of President Joe Biden’s inauguration. He told parishioners that “prophetic voices” had told him in 2016 that Trump would have eight consecutive years in office.
The Frisco Conservative Coalition board voted to suspend Burden as chair for 30 days after criticism about his remarks.
Burden called his comments “inartful” but claimed he was unfairly targeted for his views. “The establishment media is coming after me,” he said at the time. “But it is not just about me. People of faith are under attack in this country.”
Since then, Burden has repeatedly preached that the church has been designated by the Lord to decide who should serve in public office and “take dominion” over Frisco.
As the runoff for the Frisco City Council approached last year, Burden supported Jennifer White, a local veterinarian. White had positioned herself as the conservative candidate in the nonpartisan race against Angelia Pelham, a Black human resources executive who had the backing of the Frisco mayor.
White said she wasn’t in attendance during the May 2021 sermon in which Burden called her the “candidate that God wants to win.” She said she does not believe pastors should endorse candidates from the pulpit, but she welcomed churches becoming more politically active.
“I think that the churches over the years have been a big pretty big disappointment to the candidates in that they won't take a political stance,” White said in an interview. “So I would love it if churches would go ahead and come out and actually discuss things like morality. Not a specific party, but at least make sure people know where the candidates stand on those issues. And how to vote based on that.”
Pelham’s husband, local pastor Dono Pelham, also made a statement that violated the Johnson Amendment by “indirectly intervening” in the campaign, said Ellen Aprill, an emerita tax law professor at Loyola Marymount Law School in Los Angeles
In May 2021, Pelham told his church that the race for a seat on the City Council had resulted in a runoff. He acknowledged that his church’s tax-exempt status prevented him from supporting candidates from the pulpit. Then, he added, “but you’ll get the message.”
“It’s been declared for the two candidates who received the most votes, one of which is my wife,” Pelham said. “That’s just facts. That’s just facts. That’s just facts. And so a runoff is coming and every vote counts. Be sure to vote.”
Pelham then asked the congregation: “How did I do? I did all right, didn’t I? You know I wanted to go a little further, but I didn’t do it.”
Angelia Pelham, who co-founded Life-Changing Faith Christian Fellowship in 2008 with her husband, said the couple tried to avoid violating the Johnson Amendment. Both disagreed that her husband’s mention of her candidacy was a violation.
“I think church and state should remain separate,” Angelia Pelham said in an interview, adding: “But I think there’s a lot of folks in the religious setting that just completely didn’t even consider the line. They erased it completely and lost sight of the Johnson Amendment.”
She declined to discuss Burden’s endorsement of her opponent.
In his sermon the morning after Pelham defeated his chosen candidate, Burden told parishioners that the church’s political involvement would continue.
“So you’re like, but you lost last night? No, we set the stage for the future,” he said, adding “God is uncovering the demonic structure that is in this region.”
“Demonic” candidate
Most Americans don’t want pastors making endorsements from the pulpit, according to a 2017 survey by the Program for Public Consultation, which is part of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.
Of the nearly 2,500 registered voters who were surveyed, 79% opposed getting rid of the Johnson Amendment. Only among Republican evangelical voters did a slight majority — 52% — favor loosening restrictions on church political activity.
But such endorsements are taking place across the country, with some pastors calling for a debate about the Johnson Amendment.
After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, New Mexico became an island of abortion access for women in Texas and other neighboring states.
The issue raised the stakes in the upcoming Nov. 8 New Mexico governor’s race between incumbent Lujan Grisham, a supporter of abortion rights, and Republican challenger Mark Ronchetti, who advocates limiting access.
“We’re going to fast become the No. 1 abortion place in all of America,” a pastor, Steve Smothermon, said during a July 10 sermon at Legacy Church in Albuquerque, which has an average weekly attendance of more than 10,000 people. Smotherman said the governor was “wicked and evil” and called her “a narcissist.”
“And people think, ‘Why do you say that?’ Because I truly believe it. In fact, she’s beyond evil. It’s demonic,” Smothermon said.
He later added: “Folks, when are we going to get appalled? When are we going to say, ‘Enough is enough’? When are we going to stop saying, ‘Well, you know, it’s a woman’s right to choose’? That’s such a lie.”
Church attendees had a stark choice in the upcoming election, Smothermon said. “We have the Wicked Witch of the North. Or you have Mark Ronchetti.”
The governor’s campaign declined to comment. Neither Legacy Church, Smothermon nor Ronchetti responded to requests for comment.
Credit: Video Editing by Todd Wiseman/Texas Tribune and Justin Dehn/Texas Tribune. Source videos: Adria Malcolm for ProPublica/Texas Tribune, Legacy Church.
The sermon was a “clear violation” of the Johnson Amendment, said Sam Brunson, a Loyola University Chicago law professor. But Smothermon showed no fear of IRS enforcement.
Those who thought he crossed the line were “so stupid,” Smothermon said during the sermon. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
In another example, pastors at a Fort Worth church named Mercy Culture have repeatedly endorsed candidates for local and statewide offices since its founding in 2019.
“Now, obviously, churches don’t endorse candidates, but my name is Landon and I’m a person before I’m a pastor. And as an individual, I endorse Nate Schatzline,” the lead pastor, Landon Schott, said in a February sermon about a church member who was running to fill an open state representative seat.
Johnson Amendment rules allow pastors to endorse in their individual capacity, as long as they are not at an official church function, which Schott was.
In other services, Schott challenged critics to complain to the IRS about the church’s support of political candidates and said he wasn’t worried about losing the church’s tax-exempt status.
“If you want it that bad, come and take it. And if you think that we will stop preaching the gospel, speaking truth over taxes, you got another thing coming for you,” Schott said in May.
Schatzline, a member of Mercy Culture, received 65% of the vote in a May 24 runoff against the former mayor of the Dallas suburb of Southlake. He works for a separate nonprofit founded by Heather Schott, a pastor at Mercy Culture and the wife of Landon Schott.
Schatzline said in an interview with ProPublica and the Tribune that Landon Schott, not the church, endorsed him. He added that the church sought legal advice on how to ensure that it was complying with the Johnson Amendment.
“I think prayers can manifest into anything that God wants them to, but I would say that the community rallying behind me as individuals definitely manifested into votes,” Schatzline said.
Mercy Culture also supported Tim O’Hare, a Republican running for Tarrant County judge, this year after he came out against the shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. His opponent in the primary had ordered churches and businesses to temporarily close when she was mayor of Fort Worth.
O’Hare came to prominence as the mayor of suburban Farmers Branch, where he championed a city ordinance to prohibit landlords from renting to immigrants without legal status. A federal court declared the ordinance unconstitutional in 2010 after a legal battle that cost the city $6.6 million.
O’Hare has pledged to hire an election integrity officer to oversee voting and “uncover election fraud.”
“The Lord spoke to me and said, ‘Begin to pray for righteous judges in our city,’” Heather Schott said during a Feb. 13 service. “I am believing that Mr. Tim O’Hare is an answered prayer of what we have been petitioning heaven for for the last year and a half.”
Neither Mercy Culture, Landon Schott nor Heather Schott responded to requests for comment. O’Hare also did not respond to a phone call and email seeking comment.
Schott’s comments were a prohibited endorsement, said Aprill, the emerita tax law professor at Loyola Marymount Law School in Los Angeles.
“It doesn’t say ‘vote for him’ but is still an endorsement,” she said. “There’s no other way to understand the statement that O’Hare has answered prayers for righteous judges.”
Two weeks later, O’Hare won his primary. He faces Deborah Peoples, a Democrat, on Nov. 8.
A new tactic
On April 18, 2021, a day before early voting began for city council and school board elections across Texas, pastors at churches just miles apart flashed the names of candidates on overhead screens. They told their congregations that local church leaders had gathered to discuss upcoming city and school elections and realized that their members were among those seeking office.
“We’re not endorsing a candidate. We’re not doing that. But we just thought because they’re a member of the family of God, that you might want to know if someone in the family and this family of churches is running,” said Robert Morris, who leads the Gateway megachurch in Southlake and served as a member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board.
On the same day, Doug Page gave a similar message less than 5 miles away at First Baptist Grapevine.
“And so what we decided to do is look within our church families and say, ‘Who do we know that’s running for office?’ Now, let me clarify with you. This is not an endorsement by us. We are not endorsing anyone. However, if you’re part of a family, you’d like to know if Uncle Bill is running for office, right? And so that’s all we’re going to do is simply inform you.”
Saying that you are not endorsing a candidate “isn’t like a magic silver bullet that makes it so that you’re not endorsing them,” Brunson said.
Credit: Video editing by Todd Wiseman/Texas Tribune and Justin Dehn/Texas Tribune. Source videos: Shelby Tauber for ProPublica/Texas Tribune, Gateway Church, First Baptist Grapevine.
The churches’ coordination on messaging across the area is notable, according to University of Notre Dame tax law professor Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, who said he hadn’t before seen churches organizing to share lists of candidates.
“I do think this strategy is new,” said Mayer, who has studied the Johnson Amendment for more than a decade. “I hadn’t heard of that before. It’s quite a sophisticated tactic.”
Eight of the nine candidates mentioned by the pastors won their races.
Mindy McClure, who ran for reelection to the Grapevine-Colleyville school board, said she thought church involvement contributed to her defeat in a June 5, 2021, runoff by about 4 percentage points. Her opponent campaigned on removing critical race theory from district curriculum, while McClure said students “weren’t being indoctrinated in any way, shape or form.” Critical race theory is a college-level academic theory that racism is embedded in legal systems.
McClure said pastors endorsing from the pulpit creates “divisiveness” in the community.
“Just because you attend a different church doesn’t mean that you’re more connected with God,” she said.
Lawrence Swicegood, executive director of Gateway Media, said this month that the church doesn’t endorse candidates but “inform(s) our church family of other church family members who are seeking office to serve our community.” Page told ProPublica and the Tribune that “these candidates were named for information only.”
Eleven days after responding to ProPublica and the Tribune in October, Morris once again told his church that he was not endorsing any candidates during the last Sunday sermon before early voting. Then, he again displayed the names of specific candidates on a screen and told parishioners to take screenshots with their cellphones.
“We must vote,” he said. “I think we have figured that out in America, that the Christians sat on the sidelines for too long. And then all of a sudden they started teaching our children some pretty mixed up things in the schools. And we had no one to blame but ourselves. So let’s not let that happen. Especially at midterms.”
Disclosure: Rice University, the Baker Institute for Public Policy and Southern Methodist University have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
Help us report: How do religious institutions in your area involve themselves in elections?
ProPublica and The Texas Tribune want to understand how the Johnson Amendment is enforced — or isn’t. Please send us examples of any political activity you see at churches or other religious institutions, and we’ll look into whether or not it breaks the rules. We want to hear about examples across the political spectrum.
The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.
Several blasts shook Kyiv on Monday, days after Russia blamed Ukraine for drone attacks on its Crimea fleet in the Black Sea.
At least five explosions were heard in the Ukrainian capital between 8:00 am (0600 GMT) and 8:20 am, according to AFP journalists.
Kyiv had already been hit on October 10 and 17 by drones.
After Monday's blasts, mayor Vitali Klitschko said in a Telegram message: "An area of Kyiv is without electricity and certain areas without water following Russian strikes."
Monday's attack on the Ukrainian capital comes after Russia pulled out of a landmark agreement that allowed vital grain shipments via a maritime safety corridor.
The July deal to unlock grain exports signed between warring nations Russia and Ukraine -- and brokered by Turkey and the United Nations -- is critical to easing the global food crisis caused by the conflict.
"(A) bulk carrier loaded with 40 tons of grain was supposed to leave the Ukraine port today," Infrastructure Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov tweeted.
"These foodstuffs were intended for Ethiopians, that are on the verge of famine. But due to the blockage of the 'grain corridor' by Russia the export is impossible," the Ukrainian minister said.
The agreement, which established a corridor through which vessels could travel to Istanbul for inspections, had already allowed more than nine million tonnes of Ukrainian grain to be exported and was due to be renewed on November 19.
But Russia announced Saturday it would pull out of the deal after accusing Kyiv of a "massive" drone attack on its Black Sea fleet, which Ukraine labelled a "false pretext".
US President Joe Biden called the move "purely outrageous" while Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Moscow was "weaponizing food".
Russia's defense ministry alleged Sunday the attack drones had "Canadian-made navigation modules", and that they "were moving in the safe zone of the 'grain corridor'".
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Sunday expressed "deep concern" about the situation, his spokesman said, and delayed his departure for an Arab League Summit in Algiers by a day "to focus on the issue".
The EU on Sunday urged Russia to "revert its decision".
Enough grain to 'feed millions'
The centre coordinating the logistics of the deal said in a statement that no traffic would move through the safety corridor on Sunday.
"A joint agreement has not been reached... for the movement of inbound and outbound vessels on 30 October," it said. "There are more than 10 vessels both outbound and inbound waiting to enter the corridor."
Turkey's defense ministry later Sunday said ships would not leave Ukraine "during this period" but Turkey would continue checks of ships in Istanbul carrying Ukrainian grain "today and tomorrow".
It also said Russia had formally notified Turkey of its suspension but "Russian personnel remained at the coordination centre" in Istanbul.
The Istanbul-based Joint Coordination Center (JCC) announced later Sunday that Russia had also suspended its participation in the grain inspections.
Ninety-seven loaded ships were waiting for clearance off Istanbul's coast Sunday, the United Nations, which coordinates the JCC, said in a statement, adding it was proposing reopening the "maritime humanitarian corridor" to about a dozen vessels on Monday.
In his evening address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said "more than 2 million tons of food" were at sea, but stalled by Russia's actions.
"This is an absolutely transparent intention of Russia to return the threat of large-scale famine to Africa and Asia," he added.
'Peddling false claims'
Sevastopol in Moscow-annexed Crimea has been targeted several times in recent months and serves as the Black Sea fleet's headquarters and a logistical hub for operations in Ukraine.
Russia's army claimed to have "destroyed" nine aerial drones and seven maritime ones in an attack on the port early Saturday.
It alleged British "specialists" based in the southern Ukrainian city of Ochakiv had helped prepare and train Kyiv to carry out the strike.
In a further singling out of the UK -- which Moscow sees as one of the most unfriendly Western countries -- Russia said the same British unit was involved in explosions on the Nord Stream gas pipelines last month.
Britain strongly rebutted both claims, saying "the Russian Ministry of Defense is resorting to peddling false claims of an epic scale".
Moscow's military said ships targeted at their Crimean base were involved in the grain deal.
'Massive' attack
Russia had recently criticized the deal, saying its own grain exports have suffered due to Western sanctions.
Mikhail Razvozhayev, the Moscow-installed governor of Sevastopol, said Saturday's drone attack was the "most massive" the peninsula had seen.
Attacks on Crimea, annexed by Moscow in 2014, have increased recently as Kyiv presses a counter-offensive in the south to retake territory held by Moscow.
Kyiv said Sunday its troops in the south are "holding their positions and hit the enemy in order to create conditions for further offensive actions."
Moscow-installed authorities in Kherson, just north of Crimea, have vowed to turn the city into a fortress, preparing for an inevitable assault.
Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro lost the presidential election as declared on Sunday evening. With 99 percent reporting, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva scored 60,144,431 votes at 50.9 percent, whereas the far right's Bolsonaro got just 58,053,463.
President Joe Biden has already congratulated the new president.
"I send my congratulations to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on his election to be the next president of Brazil following free, fair, and credible elections. I look forward to working together to continue the cooperation between our two countries in the months and years ahead," he said in a statement.
There is a question about whether Bolsonaro will accept the election results. Last week, Lula expressed concern that he might not, a tactic that ally Donald Trump utilized in his 2020 election results and other far-right candidates have adopted.
In a press conference Monday, Lula said he hoped Bolsonaro “will have a moment of sanity and phone me to accept the election result."
The New York Times interviewed a Bolsonaro supporter named Kátia de Lima, “There will be a civil war. And the armed forces are going to be on our side.”
In the past, Bolsonaro has questioned the legitimacy of electronic voting machines.
According to a report from the Daily Beast, with the midterm election just days away, more and more questions are being raised about a Donald Trump-endorsed candidate seeking a re-districted open House seat in North Carolina with the GOP nominee being coy about her marital history -- among other issues.
As the report notes, Sandy Smith, who is opposing Democrat Donald Davis in a revamped district that would have gone for Joe Biden over Donald Trump 53.2 percent to 45.9 in 2020, has so far avoided the scrutiny that many other MAGA-adjacent Republican candidates have been subjected to.
As the Beast's Jeffrey Billman wrote, back on Oct. 6, Smith told an interviewer that she has been married three times, but it seems to have slipped her mind that she was part of another marriage.
"In fact, Smith has been married at least four times, The Daily Beast has learned. The Republican congressional candidate’s current marriage to businessman William Smith and two earlier marriages—to Randall Auman Jr. from 1995 to 2001 and Eric Goranson from 2007 to 2010—have previously been reported. But Washington State family court records obtained by The Daily Beast reveal that Smith also married a man namedKen Davis on Dec. 23, 2003, then divorced him a year later," he wrote before adding that there are, "fresh questions about Smith’s past. They also underline the concerns establishment Republicans have harbored about Smith’s viability."
At issue, beyond her attendance at the Jan. 6 "Stop the Steal" rally and a trail of "unhinged" social media posts, is a history of domestic violence involving one of her husbands --who claims she tried to run him down with a car -- and her daughter, among other disputes.
"After an argument on July 9, 2012, Smith’s then-17-year-old daughter sought a protective order against her mother in Lenoir County, North Carolina, alleging that she 'held me down by my hair and punched me in the face with a closed fist.' Her daughter, whom The Daily Beast is not naming, also said Smith called her a 'slut, c*nt, b*tch, whore, tramp, loser, crackhead, trailer park trash, etc.,' according to the request for a protective order she filed two days later."
The report adds Smith has denied the accusations.
According to Western Carolina University political scientist Christopher Cooper, it is probably a good thing for the Republican candidate that she hasn't drawn more attention.
“It seems to be the Sandy Smith strategy to avoid the media and hope for a good year for Republicans,” Cooper explained. “Given the set of circumstances she has, that’s probably a pretty good political play. The more attention there is on her as a candidate, the worse I think it’s going to be for her candidacy and for the Republican Party.”
