One day after VA02 Republican nominee Jen Kiggans refused repeatedly (literally RUNNING AWAY from reporters!) to state the simple, obvious fact that Joe Biden fairly and legitimately won the 2020 election, Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA02) – who Kiggans is trying to defeat – is participating in the latest televised meeting of the January 6th House Select Committee. Can there be any greater a contrast between these two candidates – Kiggans, who pushes and/or refuses to refute the “Big Lie,” and Luria, who is doing her patriotic duty by defending our constitution, rule of law and democracy. This November, everyone in VA02 – certainly anyone who cares about preserving our democracy – needs to vote accordingly…for Rep. Elaine Luria!
Rep. Luria: “Mid-December was a turning point. President Trump made a decision, a choice to ignore the courts and his advisors and to push forward to overturn the election. His efforts to overturn the election were not random or disconnected. They were part of a coordinated multi-part plan to ensure that he stayed in power. Donald Trump was the driver behind each part of this plan. He was personally and directly involved. Of course, a key element of the plan was continuing to convince tens of millions of Americans that he did not in fact lose. Again, he did this even though his own campaign advisors and his Justice Department officials told him his claims of fraud were wrong. In this video, you will see that even when top law enforcement officials told the president his election fraud claims were false, he still repeated the claim in the days and weeks that followed. Sometimes, even the very next day…
…This happened over and over again. And our committee’s report will document it. Purposeful lies made in public, directly at odds with what Donald Trump knew from unassailable sources – the Justice Department’s own investigation and his own campaign. Donald Trump maliciously repeated this nonsense to a wide audience over and over again. His intent was to deceive. President Trump’s plan also involved trying to force government officials to change the election outcome in the states he lost. He personally reached out to numerous state officials and pressured them to take unlawful steps to alter the election results in those states. His actions, taken directly by the president himself, made it clear what his intentions were, to prevent the orderly transfer of power. We all recall, for example, President Trump’s tape-recorded call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. At the time this call occurred, President Trump had already been told repeatedly by the U.S. Justice Department, by his campaign, and his advisors at his allegations of fraud in Georgia were false…
…’I just want to find 11,780 votes.’ That is an extraordinary demand by the president, especially since he already knew from the Justice Department there was no genuine basis for this request. No one could think it would be legal for the Secretary of State to simply “find the votes” the president needed in order to win. Secretary Raffensperger told the president the truth, that he lost the election in Georgia, but President Trump would not accept that answer. Instead, he suggested that Secretary Raffensperger himself might be prosecuted…
…We know President Trump’s White House advisors reacted negatively. Immediately after the call, Cassidy Hutchinson had a conversation with the Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows… This call and other related activities is now the focus of an ongoing criminal investigation in Fulton County, Georgia. And Georgia is not the only state where President Trump tried to pressure state officials to change the results. He also attempted to pressure state officials in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan to change the results in those states as well. While President Trump was pressuring state officials, he was also trying to use the Department of Justice to change the election results. His top officials told him that there was no evidence to support his claims of fraud. But he didn’t care, and he told them, just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican Congress.
When these officials would not do what he said, President Trump embarked in an effort to install Jeff Clark as acting attorney general. Solely because he would do what others in the department would not do. We know that Trump was doing so for a specific purpose, so Clark could employ the Justice Department’s authority to help persuade the states to slip electoral votes. For example, when Richard Donoghue and Jeff Rosen, both appointed by President Trump, learned of Mr. Clarke’s proposal, here is what they said — why they said they forcefully rejected it…
…We know from our investigation that President Trump offered Jeff Clark the position of Acting Attorney General and that Jeff Clark had decided to accept it. The only reason this ultimately did not happen is that the White House Counsel and a number of Justice Department officials confronted the president in the Oval Office and threatened mass resignations…The president ultimately relented. Only because the entire leadership of the Department of Justice, as well as his White House Counsel, threatened to resign.”
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