Hugh Jackson, Nevada Current

What do real voters want? Don't ask these Dem squishes

Talk tough on crime and immigration, don’t say trans, and sit back and let Trump’s economy make voters mad.

That’s the way to Make Democrats Great Again, or so say the roughly eleventy-nine Democratic-allied centrist political action committees and think tanks, some old, many new, who promise they know how to right (pun intended) the ship and rebrand the Democratic Party.

Nevada U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto is heading up one of those groups, the Moderate Democrats PAC. That’s appropriate because she’s a one-time chair of the official PAC of Senate Democrats so she’s experienced at raising money. And when it comes to blind faith in moderation, you could say she’s a radical extremist.

Cortez Masto was momentarily and uncharacteristically trending this summer when she sparred with her Democratic colleague Cory Booker while working to pass a pair of “Police Week” crime bills supported by the entire Senate (including Booker; the whole thing was kind of dopey).

Alas, Cortez Masto’s long-held tendency to back all things cop notwithstanding, the Democratic Senate candidates her Moderate Democrats PAC is raising money for are still going to be called “soft on crime” or whatever in Republican attack ads. That’s just how it works.

And sorry, Nevada Democratic Rep. Susie Lee. Marching in lockstep with Fox alumnus celebrity and D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro and being one of only eight House Democrats voting with Republicans to allow 14-year-olds to be tried as adults in Washington D.C. courts may have seemed like a politically prudent thing to do at the time. But it’s not going to stop Republicans from calling you a radical leftist criminal coddler, or words to that effect. In ads.

Cortez Masto and Lee, along with the rest of Nevada’s Democrats in Congress — Sen. Jacky Rosen and Reps. Dina Titus and Steven Horsford — have also voted for things like a fearmongering Trump bill to deprive immigrants of due process under the law. But Republicans are still going to say Nevada’s congressional Democrats “love open borders” because that’s how Republicans roll.

The newest entry in the organizational race to persuade Democrats to tack right and party like it’s 1989 is a think tank formed by Adam Jentleson, a former staffer to the late Harry Reid. Jentleson tells the New York Times that the “folks who are most to blame about Trump are the ones who pushed Democrats to take indefensible positions,” on contentious issues, especially LGBTQ+ ones.

Every Democratic politician in the country could stop talking about trans people this very minute. In fact, most of them already have. If they ever did. But guess what? Republicans are still going to squeal and scream that Democrats want, as Trump bizarrely puts it, “transgender for everybody.”

There may be some Democratic politicians who sincerely share Trump’s fever dream that “transgender for everybody,” whatever that is, is just around the corner. (Titus and Horsford don’t, by the way).

There are probably also some Democratic politicians who share Trump’s desire to create a shoot first-ask-questions-later-if-ever police state. Or who applaud Trump’s zeal for wrecking not only lives but the economy by indiscriminately deporting people whose only crime was doing what it took to escape poverty and/or oppression.

But if Democrats believe refraining from opposing Trump on divisive socio-cultural issues will make people vote for them instead of Republicans, that seems problematic. It’s not like Republicans are going to stop hammering Democrats on those issues just because Democrats don’t talk about them.

Given a choice between a Democrat who has officially cried “uncle” in fear of Republican red meat attack ads and a Republican who keeps launching those ads anyway, people who are moved by those issues can still be expected to vote for the Republican.

Ye olde thought leaders

The centrist groups vying for Democratic thought leadership are defined almost exclusively by what they want Democrats not to do.

As to what Democrats should do, the centrist group growth industry is fuzzy, collectively mumbling something about “kitchen table issues” and “common-sense.”

Policies and positions reflecting such phrases and concepts were used again and again by Democrats on the campaign trail last year (as they are every campaign year). And they were voiced far, far more often than support for LGBTQ+ rights or sensible immigration reforms. The policy pitch by the centrist groups sounds a lot like the same old.

Which brings us to perhaps the one strategy in the moderate Democratic agenda, (in as much as there is either a strategy or an agenda) that might be loosely termed proactive: Reaffirm support for popular policies, especially health care policies, and hope that voters get sick of Trump’s economic shenanigans.

As rebrandings go, it’s sad-trombone soft and tiresomely derivative.

And it fails to address perhaps the biggest questions about next year’s elections: What exactly is the electorate anymore, and what does it want?

In polling both before and after the 2024 election, voters said their top concern was the economy.

A Fox News poll released last week found 52 percent of those surveyed said Trump is making the economy worse, compared to only 30 percent who said he’s making it better (let alone great again). Numerous other surveys also find Trump underwater on the economy.

So maybe all Democrats need to do is vow to “fight” to protect health care provisions and programs, and then sit back while Republicans sink under the weight of Trump’s economic blundering. And then Democrats might at least take back the House in 2026 (assuming there will be an election), which is the first step toward overturning Trumpism in 2028.

But voter responses to pollsters about the economy notwithstanding, something other than the cost of things — and something other than immigration, and even something other than video of Kamala Harris saying “transgender” out loud, for that matter — was going on with voters last year.

A sizable percentage of Nevada voters told pollsters they wanted to “tear down the system completely.”

Could the tear it down vote be potent enough to neutralize voters’ economic frustration next year? Especially if the economy merely limps along (as per some projections) instead of dropping into recession (as per others)?

Normally that would be unthinkable. But “normally” doesn’t exist anymore.

The evangelizers who swear that centrism will solve everything and the Nevada politicians who love them promise they’ll save the nation by embracing “mainstream positions” and “common sense.”

The last time voters in the nation and Nevada had a chance to express themselves, they elected Trump president. In other words, it’s anybody’s guess if Nevada’s congressional Democrats, and groups like Jentleson’s, have the foggiest idea what, if anything, passes for mainstream common sense anymore.

What’s equally disturbing is how blithely they assume they do.

Hugh Jackson is editor of the Nevada Current

Convicted GOP grifter pardoned by convicted GOP grifter

Convicted grifter Michele Fiore getting pardoned by fellow convicted grifter Donald Trump reflects a casual disregard for law enforcement, and a blithe disrespect for one former law enforcement official in particular: Nevada’s Republican governor.

Money Fiore raised to build a statue honoring a police officer killed in the line of duty was reportedly spent on plastic surgery and other expenses incurred in the course of the care and feeding of Michele Fiore.

Gov. Joe Lombardo testified at Fiore’s trial as a self-described “victim” of Fiore’s grift. While sheriff running for reelection, Lombardo’s campaign contributed $5,000 to Fiore’s purported memorial effort in 2019.

Lombardo is declining to comment on Fiore’s pardon. That’s too bad, because it would be fun to watch him yet again try to thread that needle between expressing mild non-approval of some bat guano thing Trump did or said yet not get browbeaten by some Trump flunky as a result.

Nevada also has a right to know if Lombardo, the governor after all, is in the loop. Was he informed about Fiore’s pardon beforehand, and if so, who informed him? Someone from the White House? A gloating Fiore herself? Interim U.S. attorney for Nevada (and Fiore’s fellow full-on MAGAwhackadoodle kindred spirit) Sigal Chattah?

Or did Lombardo find out about it at the same time as everybody else?

When Fiore was convicted in October, noting how Fiore wears her weapons worship on her sleeve, I joked in the Daily Current newsletter that “Maybe her beloved idol Trump will pardon her and appoint her director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.”

Well, we’re halfway there.

In a statement dripping with pathetic melodrama and theatrical piety, Fiore said for now she’ll be returning to a different job for which she is woefully unfit on countless levels and to which she never should have been appointed in the first place, Nye County’s justice of the peace in Pahrump. But it’s not clear if that’s going to happen.

And frankly, now that Trump, during a break from his busy schedule of wrecking the global economy and imposing misery and despair on untold millions, gave her brand as a Trumpy grifter extraordinaire a boost, Fiore can probably land, if not the ATF job, at least a position that’s both more high-high profile and better-paying.

Maybe Chattah is staffing up the U.S. attorney’s office in Nevada to launch lawfare and retribution against people who have displeased Michele Fiore, and will name Fiore special DOJ agent in charge? Maybe Chattah’s office will buy Fiore an armored Cybertruck!

Meanwhile, to reiterate, all this is demeaning to Lombardo, and makes him look snubbed and small. And to think just earlier this month Lombardo went to such great pains to showcase his capacity for MAGAliciously crude and hateful buffoonery. As the master and model of the genre used to always say: Sad.

A version of this commentary was originally published in the Daily Current newsletter, which is free and which you can subscribe to here.

Some of the false, curious and just weird things a rambling Trump said in Las Vegas Sunday

“Virtually 100 percent of the new jobs under Biden have also gone to illegal aliens. Did you know that? A hundred percent.”

That was one of the false claims Donald Trump asserted during an address in Las Vegas Sunday that was predominantly about immigration but that veered wildly in multiple directions, including insulting his teleprompter provider, mulling the prospect of being killed by an electric boat as opposed to a being killed by a shark, and reading a poem about a snake.

To reiterate, his claim is false. One hundred percent of new jobs created during the Biden administration were not taken by migrants who crossed the U.S. border illegally, for a lot of reasons, not least being that it would be statistically impossible.

The White House likes to say that 15 million jobs have been created since Biden became president. But 9 million of those were jobs that had been lost during the pandemic and came back. An argument can be made that policies enacted by Biden and congressional Democrats were crucial to bringing those jobs back, especially as quickly as it was done. But let’s play a Trump-friendly devil’s advocate and say the administration can only claim 6 million new jobs have been created under Biden’s watch.

About 2.5 million migrants who crossed the U.S. border illegally were released into the U.S under the Biden administration. Perhaps another estimated 1.6 million “gotaways” got into the U.S. by circumventing the authorities, potentially bringing the total to a little more than 4 million, including children.

That’s more than the number who entered the U.S. while Trump was president. But not enough to fill 6 million jobs – new jobs, by the way, that were spread broadly across several employment sectors, including hundreds of thousands of professional and technical positions, many of which would require accepted certifications that would make hiring of undocumented workers highly unlikely.

Here are some of the other false, curious, or just weird things Trump said in Las Vegas Sunday, in no particular order:

On the Nevada Republican U.S. Senate Primary. Trump has not endorsed in the contest featuring Sam Brown and Jeff Gunter, and Trump didn’t endorse either candidate on Sunday. But one of his random, scattered rants about his teleprompter not working properly reminded him of a faulty teleprompter during an Ohio rally earlier this year. That train of thought in turn led him to swerve into noting the Republican candidate he endorsed in the primary for U.S. Senate in Ohio (Bernie Moreno) will be facing “a senator named Brown” (incumbent Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown).

“You have a man named Brown right here, you know. Very good,” Trump said, without clarifying who that “man named Brown right here” was, or if he had a first name, or why Trump had mentioned him.

On wage growth for Black workers. Under the Biden administration, “Real wages of African Americans and the workers of all over the world that came here legally – they’re down six percent,” Trump said. Trump’s impression that the Middle Passage was a form of legal immigration aside, his assertion about real wages, to borrow a phrase Trump led his crowd to chant on more than one occasion Sunday, is “bullshit.”

Historically disadvantaged groups are disproportionately employed in low-wage jobs. According to a recent Economic Policy Institute analysis of wage and census data, real wages – that is, adjusted for inflation – among low-income workers were 12% percent higher in 2023 than they were in 2019.

“Black men, young workers, and working mothers experienced particularly fast wage growth over the last four years,” the report found.

The Economist (far from a wild-eyed leftist publication) concluded in a separate analysis of federal data earlier this year that “median earnings for Black workers were about 84% of those of white Americans at the end of 2023” – further progress needs to be achieved, obviously – but that is “a sharp rise from the 79% average of the preceding two decades.”

On “suckers” and “losers.” Trump is very mad at Joe Biden, who often notes that Trump in 2018 reportedly skipped visiting a cemetery where more than 2,000 U.S. soldiers who died in World War I are buried, and referred to the deceased Marines as “losers” and “suckers.” The report, originally published in The Atlantic in 2020, was later confirmed by Trump’s then-chief of staff, John Kelly.

“Think of it from a practical standpoint,” Trump said while denying the event in Las Vegas Sunday. “I’m standing there with generals and military people in a cemetery” – Trump is off to an inauspicious start here, as he didn’t go to the cemetery – “and I look at them. I say ‘These people are suckers and losers.’ Now, think of it. Unless you’re a psycho or a crazy person or a very stupid person, who would say that, anyway?”

Who indeed?

On the First Amendment. “I do a great show,” the professional television personality said, referring to his interviews on Fox News. But then “they put on commercials that are just horrible,” evidently referring to commercials paid for by campaigns or organizations that are not pro-Trump. “They shouldn’t be doing that,” he said.

On if he loses to Biden: If he doesn’t win, Trump warned, “you’re headed to World War III. You are closer now to World War III than you’ve ever been, and this is no longer army tanks going back and forth shooting – World War II, World War… There are nuclear weapons the likes of which and the power of which has never, ever been seen before. So again I want to thank you all. I want to thank all the celebrities for being here. We have great celebrities.”

***

At least it was a partly cloudy day, and a bit cooler than it has been. (While I was there, anyway; I left early to beat the traffic, and then caught the parts I’d missed on CSPAN). Still, six people were transported to hospitals, according to the Clark County Fire Department. Hopefully they’re all ok.

Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nevada Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Hugh Jackson for questions: info@nevadacurrent.com. Follow Nevada Current on Facebook and Twitter.

Trump promises ‘aggressive’ election interference in battleground states

Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee on Friday announced a “100,000 person strong” program designed to harass election officials and their employees and discredit democracy in Nevada and a dozen other states.

In a statement announcing its Orwellian named “election integrity program,” the RNC said it is “establishing a robust network of monitoring, and protection against any violation or fraud.”

Neither the RNC, Trump, nor anyone else has ever provided any evidence of fraud that would have altered results of the 2020 election that Trump lost to Joe Biden.

“We will aggressively take them to court,” declared Charlie Spies, the RNC’s lead lawyer in the program.

Again?

More than five dozen lawsuits filed by Trump and Republicans challenged the 2020 election results, including several suits in Nevada. To reiterate, the existence of significant fraud or illegal voting was not found in a single one of those cases.

“The Democrat tricks from 2020 won’t work this time,” Spies said.

A few weeks after the Trump-instigated January 6 attempt to steal the election, Spies himself acknowledged lies launched by Trump and his allies about the 2020 election are “simply not true.”

The RNC’s announcement issued Friday is loaded with hyperbole and innuendo about “voter fraud,” and a “rigged” election, but refers to no evidence of either. That’s not surprising. To reiterate, the courts and election officials in state after state, including Nevada’s then-Secretary of State, Republican Barbara Cegavske, found no evidence that the 2020 election was “rigged.”

But the RNC isn’t promising to intimidate election officials and workers in Nevada because of evidence of wrongdoing in 2020. The RNC is launching its effort because Trump controls the RNC, and he told it to.

‘Democrat tricks from 2020’? Do tell.

With Friday’s RNC announcement, the de facto official position of the Republican Party in 2024 is that in 2020, in Nevada and several other states, every election official, including multiple Republican ones, along with thousands of poll workers and election staff in those states, were co-conspirators in an extravagant and sweeping conspiracy to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump.

Many of the federal judges rejecting suits from Trump and Republicans in 2020 had been appointed by Republican presidents. Several of them had been appointed by Trump.

Yet for the “Democrat tricks from 2020” to have worked, dozens of state and federal judges would have also had to be in on the conspiracy.

For the alleged plot – again, the existence of which is now a fundamental premise of the official Republican Party – to succeed, not just judges but thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of people across the country would have had to have been in on it. It would have had to be an unprecedentedly sophisticated bipartisan conspiracy spanning all branches of local, state and federal government in multiple states.

And yet to this day, and despite multiple and ongoing efforts to prove election fraud by everyone from Trump’s ever-changing stable of quack lawyers to the RNC to Fox News to the My Pillow guy, not a single one of the thousands and thousands of people who would have had to participate in the “Democrat tricks” have confirmed any Republican allegations of the alleged vast conspiracy.

Because there was no conspiracy.

There was an election.

Trump lost.

Whether Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, who co-chairs the RNC, or Sigal Chattah, who is Nevada’s Republican Committeewoman, or any of the other RNC’s leaders, members and/or staffers sincerely believe the fantasy of the “stolen” 2020 election – in other words, if they have genuinely been brainwashed into delusion – is irrelevant. The delusion is now official RNC policy. Their job is to act accordingly. And that job, specifically, is “a 100,000 person strong” effort to belittle and discredit democracy.

To belabor the obvious, the last thing Trump wants to do is protect the integrity of elections. He is dedicated to doing the opposite of that.

He relentlessly attacked the election process in the years leading up to the 2020 election in an attempt to discredit the results even before any votes had been cast, and lied about the process on election night, in an attempt to stop votes from being counted.

After all the votes had been counted he continued to tell lies about the election, and instigated the January 6 insurrection.

When that failed, he started running for president again. He’s been lying about the 2020 election and, in a repeat of his behavior prior to the 2020 election, trying to discredit the 2024 results in advance.

The RNC’s announcement Friday is not an “election integrity program.” It’s just an extension of Trump’s attacks on democracy and penchant for cheating.

How ugly will it get in Nevada?

Trump’s adoring flock continues to be mesmerized by his schtick. Pandering to that flock, Republican elected officials and office-seekers, even those who did not deny the 2020 election results, have effectively condoned Trump’s war on democracy by citing “concerns” in some segments of the public about the 2020 election – concerns that were fabricated and spread by Trump.

Those Republican elected officials and office-seekers are implying, with no evidence, that somehow some vague something must have been wrong.

If not election deniers, they are election-denier-adjacent. They are irresponsibly enabling and lending credibility to Trump’s effort to end democracy. Their behavior is despicable, cowardly, and an ongoing threat to the nation and its people.

Nevada Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo is a good example of this (although most of the Nevada press doesn’t seem to care much).

If Lombardo shows the same blithe disregard when the RNC begins intimidating Nevada election workers, filing more nuisance Nevada lawsuits in which it compares apples to orangutans, and spreading lies to undermine his constituents’ faith in the same election system by which he obtained his job, he’ll be enabling and empowering all that as well.

By looking the other way, Lombardo would also be doing his bit to help Trump nullify the votes of Nevadans in 2024, as Trump tried to do after the 2020 election.

Lara Trump as co-chair of the RNC, Michael McDonald and fellow indicted election deniers in charge of the Republican Party in Nevada, Trump’s cavalcade of weirdo lawyers … given the chuckleheads who will be involved, it’s tempting, maybe even warranted, to speculate that Trump’s lawyers and the teams of people he enlists to harass election officials and undermine democracy in Nevada won’t be any more competent in 2024 than they in were 2020, and equally ineffective at overturning legitimate election results.

But even in failing, their efforts can be pernicious, as evidenced in multiple states, most notably the pain and suffering Trump and his minions cruelly inflicted on Georgia election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman.

How ugly will it get in Nevada? Especially if Lombardo, Rep. Mark Amodei, and other Nevada Republican elected officials and candidates go along to get along with Trump? We’re about to find out.

How Nevada is normalizing its fake Trump electors

Nevada’s fake electors were indispensable to Donald Trump’s plot to steal the 2020 presidential election and the accompanying assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. And so for a minute there earlier this year, it looked like Nevada might make it a punishable offense to be a fake elector.

Instead, the Nevada Secretary of State’s office asked one to make a presentation to its Advisory Committee on Participatory Democracy last month.

It was a bizarre turn of events, since both participatory democracy and the constitutional authority of the Secretary of State’s office were what Nevada’s fake electors were trying to overthrow when they signed bogus electoral college certificates and sent them to Congress.

Since winning the office by defeating an election denier last year, Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar has participated in several appearances with secretaries of state from other states, including Michigan, Colorado, Arizona, and Georgia. At each of those gatherings, the common refrain was relief at defeating election deniers.

At one of those events, Aguilar said of his 2022 opponent, Jim Marchant, “He was out there peddling lies and misinformation to voters across the state and also across America, which was scary…What he was doing was detrimental to the future of our country.”

The election denying actions of Nevada’s fake electors are at least as if not more “scary” and “detrimental to the future of our country.” Especially with Trump steamrolling to the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

Just because the Nevada Republican Party seeks to legitimize one of its fake electors, Jim DeGraffenried, by naming him Nevada’s National Republican Committeeman, does that mean the state of Nevada has to legitimize him as well by having him give a presentation during a state-sponsored forum on participatory democracy?

Hoping they’ll be good?

The SOS office invited both major parties to make presentations to the advisory committee, which was established by state statute along with the bill replacing Nevada’s presidential caucuses with presidential preference primaries.

The invitations specified that presentations had to be made either by the state party chairs – for the Republicans, that’d be fake elector Michael McDonald – “or a designated member of your party’s executive board.” McDonald sent his literal partner in crime, DeGraffenried, who as national party committeeman, met the criteria.

The specific issue party representatives were invited to address in their presentations was “voter education in advance of the 2024 Presidential Preference Primary.”

The Nevada State Republican Party hates the primary, sued to try to kill it, and is officially boycotting it.

Instead, it’s holding a ludicrous caucus that everyone everywhere knows is rigged in favor of the man for whom McDonald and DeGraffenried violated state law in an effort to install as president: Election Denier in Chief Donald J. Trump.

And that’s all that DeGraffenried’s presentation was about: Pretending his party’s cacamamey caucus is serious.

The caucus is a private sector affair, run by the state party. The SOS office has nothing whatsoever to do with it. So why bother to hear a presentation from a fake elector, as if that’s a normal thing to do? Upon learning DeGraffenried was only going to talk about his party’s rigged caucus instead of the committee’s statutory intent – voter education for the primaries – why not rescind the invitation?

The simplest answer is that under the SOS office’s reading of state law, if they invited a rep from one major party to the advisory committee meeting, they had to invite a rep from the other, even if the other is known chiefly for its fierce hostility to facts, truth, and the rule of law.

Disinviting Republicans because they had no intention of addressing the presidential primary might give them an opportunity to cast the Nevada Secretary of State’s office as part of the George Soros-dictated deep state or whatever. Republicans might even use the example during the general election as part of its effort to discredit Nevada’s election results. Again.

It’s perhaps a not unreasonable concern.

On the other hand, McDonald and the Nevada State Republican Party are going to try to discredit Nevada’s elections anyway. They do that routinely, and have been for years.

Nevada’s totally normal fake electors

There are other possible explanations for a state office giving DeGraffenried a forum as well, having to do with the confusion over the Republican caucus and the Republican primary, and the tension between the Republican Party and the state over the whole thing. But for those explanations to matter, either the primary or the caucus, or both, would also have to matter, which they almost assuredly won’t.

But the underlying reason a fake elector was invited to give a presentation to a state committee on, of all things, “participatory democracy,” is the least savory explanation of all: Nevada has grown comfortable normalizing election deniers.

Gov. Joe Lombardo endorsed one, fake elector Jesse Law, when Law sought and won re-election to chair the Clark County Republican Party. Lombardo has posed for photos with McDonald.

Lombardo of course campaigned with – and folded for – Trump while running for governor. And Lombardo has said he’ll support Trump if Trump is the nominee.

Lombardo has not denied the 2020 presidential election results and has strived carefully to avoid being labled an election denier.

He’s just election-denier adjacent.

Combine that squishiness with the office he holds, and Lombardo has done more than any single Nevadan to normalize Trump, election denialism, and fake electors.

Aguilar seems an innocent bystander by comparison.

But that assumes such a thing exists in the Trump era.

Asked about all this, Aguilar’s office sent a statement saying administering the state’s first presidential primaries “will require unprecedented effort from this Office on voter education and outreach, which the Secretary and his team are already involved in. This will include actively and vocally combatting active mis- and dis-information.”

Aguilar also made a statement when DeGraffenried finished his presentation to the Secretary of State Advisory Committee on Political Participation:

“I just want to thank everybody for coming today, and educate us on what this looks like in the presidential preference primary with the Democrats and the caucus with the Republicans. I found it very informative and appreciate their time. So thank you.”

Thanking participants is exactly the harmless, courteous sort of thing an elected official would be expected to do after presentations at a meeting.

Totally normal.

DeGraffenried, McDonald, Law, and their fellow fake electors Duward James Hindle, Shawn Meehan, and Eileen Rice deserve a lot of things. Normalization isn’t one of them.

Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nevada Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Hugh Jackson for questions: info@nevadacurrent.com. Follow Nevada Current on Facebook and Twitter.

J6 report confirms Trump world coordination and lawlessness of Nevada fake electors

Nevada Republicans who submitted a fake slate of presidential electors to Congress after the 2020 presidential campaign were choreographed by members of Trump’s legal and campaign teams, according to information released by the House panel investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection.

Emails, texts, and other communications obtained by the committee also show that Nevada’s fake electors and Trump campaign officials knew that filing a slate of fake electors was in violation of Nevada law.

The emails and texts were referenced in transcripts of interviews the committee conducted with Nevada State Republican Chairman Michael McDonald and state party vice chair and Nevada State Republican National Committeeman James DeGraffenried.

McDonald and DeGraffenreid were among the six Nevada Republicans who signed the illegitimate Nevada electoral certificate in Carson City on Dec. 14, 2020 — the same day the legitimate signing was held virtually. In addition to McDonald and DeGraffenreid, Nevada’s fake document was signed by Duward James Hindle III, Jesse Law, Shawn Meehan and Eileen Rice.

McDonald and Degraffenreid were both subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 committee. The transcripts of the committee’s subsequent interviews with the two men show that both declined to answer questions about their role as fake electors, citing the Fifth Amendment.

Both fake electors did, however, comply with the subpoena’s request to provide text messages, emails and other communications requested by the committee. (In June, McDonald’s cell phone was seized by the FBI as part of a separate Department of Justice investigation of fake electors.)

The emails and message demonstrate the Trump team’s coordination of fake electors in Nevada and five other states, part of an effort that was central to Trump’s failed plan for Congress to decline to certify Joe Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021.

The messages indicate a plan to submit fake electors was being developed even before the 2020 election. On Oct. 30, Nevada fake elector Meehan texted DeGraffenreid, “Been reading more on electoral college. If things get really sorted up, I could see (Gov. Steve) Sisolak sending one slate and (Secretary of State) Barbara (Cegavske) having to send out our slate. As she dislikes controversial situations, I wonder how that plays out.”

Asked by the Jan. 6 committee during testimony earlier this year why an alternate slate of electors would have been considered even before the election, McDonald and DeGraffenried both took the Fifth.

In a Dec. 10, 2020 email to McDonald, DeGraffenried and others, Trump campaign attorney Kenneth Chesebro wrote: “Mayor Giuliani and others with the Trump-Pence campaign, including (Trump campaign officials) Justin Clark and Nick Trainer, asked me to reach out to you and the other Nevada electors to run point on the plan to have all Trump-Pence electors in all six contested states meet and transmit their votes to Congress on Monday, December 14.”

Asked what other communications they had with Trump’s associates regarding the coordination of submitting their electoral certificate, McDonald and DeGraffenreid took the Fifth.

They also took the Fifth when asked a series of questions related to the fact that submitting a slate of electors was not permissible under Nevada state law, which requires the secretary of state to be present at the signing, and also requires electors to commit to voting for the winner of the popular vote in the state.

Investigators cited a Dec. 9, 2020 memo from Chesebro titled “Statutory Requirements for December 14th Electoral Votes.”

“Nevada is an extremely problematic State,” the memo reads, “because it requires the meeting of the electors to be overseen by the Secretary of State, who is only supposed to permit electoral votes for the winner of the popular vote in Nevada.”

“If there were a vote in Congress to take Nevada away from Biden and Harris,” the memo continues, “presumably along with it would come a vote to overlook this procedural detail.”

In a Dec. 10, 2020 email to DeGraffenried, Chesebro wrote that Giuliani is “focused on doing everything possible to ensure that all the Trump-Pence electors vote on December 14th.”

“It may well be,” Chesebro continued, “that the electoral vote proceeds without the participation of the Secretary of State” in Nevada “on the view that these technical aspects of state law are unlikely to matter much in the end.”

Asked repeatedly about the specific points made in Chesebro’s communications, McDonald and DeGraffenreid took the Fifth.

The emails and texts disclosed in the transcripts released Wednesday also indicate the Nevada Republican Party maneuvering to keep a failed lawsuit alive so as to qualify Nevada as a “contested” state when Congress met to certify results.

A suit filed by the Nevada Republican Party and the Trump campaign challenging the election results was dismissed for lack of evidence on Dec. 4, 2020, and that ruling was unanimously upheld by the Nevada Supreme Court Dec. 8, 2020.

Texts and emails over the next few days showed Nevada Republicans were in communication with the Trump campaign about appealing the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. The communications also show a decision to “delay” filing the appeal at least until after the signing of the fake electoral certificate on Dec. 14.

“In your understanding,” McDonald was asked during his appearance before the committee, “was the purpose of a delay to ensure that the litigation was technically still pending when the elector ceremony happened?”

McDonald took the Fifth.

Loud-mouthed pro-Trump conspiracist promises to somehow lower gas prices if he's elected Nevada's secretary of state

“END the Gas Tax and HELP local Nevadans out at the pump. VOTE for Jim Marchant in 2022 and get gas prices back down!”

Finally, a politician who will lower gas prices. Jim Marchant, who recently tweeted the preceding statement, must be one heckuva can-do sort of guy.

Alas, if Marchant manages to get elected to the office he is seeking, he will be in a position to do absolutely exactly and beyond a shadow of a doubt nothing at all in any way whatsoever that would remotely have even the most miniscule impact on the price of gasoline.

Marchant, you see, is running to be Nevada’s secretary of state.

That office (unlike, say, lieutenant governor) does have several important responsibilities, the most notable being the competent supervision of free and fair elections in Nevada.

Marchant is a Trumper conspiracy theorist who believes the 2020 election was stolen by a planetary cabal that manipulated voting machines. He is one of several loud-mouthed conspiracy enthusiasts nationwide running for offices that will be in charge of elections, the better to make sure that the next time Trump runs for president, his glorious victory will not be deprived merely because of some extraneous technicality like failing to have enough votes.

Lately Marchant has been barnstorming rural Nevada counties to tell them George Soros has secretly infiltrated their election systems so … Trump’s huge victories in their counties in the last two presidential elections were illegitimate? Just kidding, that’s not Marchant’s “point.” He’s merely trying to discredit democracy any way he can because that’s popular with Republicans and he wants to win an election while we still have them.

Yes, Marchant’s is an immoral and anti-American mission. But whether he’s been suckered in and believes all the global deep state conspiracy garbage that oozes from his piehole or he’s just saying that stuff because it’s what sells these days, it is, albeit in a vile and perverse way, related to the job he’s seeking.

Gas prices aren’t though.

Neither are inflation and supply chain problems, school choice, the Thacker Pass lithium project, the cost of housing, and school mascots, some of the other topics over which Marchant has suggested that, if elected, he would exert influence. Which he would not.

International relations, diplomacy and the provision of U.S. military assistance are also subjects which fall squarely outside the Nevada secretary of state’s portfolio. Yet Marchant, while campaigning for that office, observed that Ukraine Pres. Vladimir Zelesnky “is no different than Biden, Clinton, Obama and that cabal.”

Marchant has provided no proof of 2020 election fraud, but he is convincingly demonstrating that “cabal” is his favorite fancy word.

Many fellow conspiro-trash peddlers seeking public office have endorsed Marchant’s candidacy in the Republican primary, because of course they have. Adam Laxalt, for instance. And Michele Fiore.

Fiore, you may recall, was running to actually be the governor of an actual state. Nevada, specifically. But she chickened out and scurried to a less-crowded, presumably more winnable GOP primary, and is running to be Nevada’s state treasurer.

The scandals, messes and humiliations Fiore has started, stepped in or starred in over the years are far too numerous to mention in a single column, especially one that isn’t really about her. She is seemingly under perpetual investigation for some money-related shenan or other, most recently campaign finance irregularities. As I’ve observed elsewhere, if she is elected state treasure the state of Nevada’s most urgent priority will be statutorily stripping that office of as many responsibilities as is constitutionally possible in an effort to keep the number of ensuing investigations in the low teens.

But I digress…

Like Marchant, Fiore does not shy from non sequiturs in her quest for a reliable full-time salary, er, to become state treasurer.

“Fight back on BIDENFLATION! VOTE Republican and Michele Fiore in 2022!” she recently tweeted. Maybe she’s just confused, and thinks she filed to run for treasurer of the United States. That position might offer some, albeit very limited, power over decisions that might conceivably influence inflation. The office of treasurer of Nevada, however, is as relevant to consumer prices as Marchant is to the price of gas. Which is to say not at all.

Well, it’s Fiore. Not even her supporters take her seriously.

But they might be misled by her.

“We need to eliminate Nevada’s deficit and balance the budget!,” she exclaimed in another recent social media declaration.

A state treasurer will be involved in monitoring deficits and surpluses, but revenue and spending are set by legislators and the governor. The influence of a state treasurer on deficits and surpluses, inasmuch as it exists at all, is (sorry, state Treasurer Zach Conine) teensy weensy.

That de minimis influence would be even smaller if Fiore had the job, because, again, everyone in state government will be doing all they can to keep her mitts as far away as possible from, well, everything and anything that matters.

But more importantly, as anyone who is the sort of person who makes it this far into one of my columns assuredly knows, in Nevada as in the vast majority of states, the state is constitutionally required to have a balanced budget. Fiore can’t “eliminate Nevada’s deficit” because it is unconstitutional for the state to have a budget deficit in the first place.

What is Fiore even talking about?

That’s a rhetorical question. Nobody cares.

On the bright side (where I’m always looking), if Marchant and Fiore win their primaries and then Republicans sweep the statewide offices in the general election, Secretary of State Marchant and Treasurer Fiore will be two more Stranger Things, of what will assuredly be several, to keep Joe Lombardo up at night wondering what the hell he was thinking when he let those fancy pants consultants sweet-talk him into running for governor.