J6 Committee Seeks To Criminalize Republican Fundraising
Article by Mollie Hemingway in The Federalist
J6 Committee Seeks To Criminalize Republican Fundraising
If crying ‘rigged election’ were a crime, the entire Democrat Party and much of the media establishment would be in prison.
After spying on the communications of members of Congress, seizing bank records of Americans engaged in peaceful protest, fabricating evidence against political opponents, and threatening freedom of the press, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s hand-picked Jan. 6 Committee has told media allies it will try to criminalize the act of Republicans raising funds for safeguarding elections.
The latest abuse of power from the norm-breaking committee was revealed earlier this week in a one-sided report from the committee’s propaganda arm at The Washington Post.
The committee, composed exclusively of Democrat-appointed members, is seeking access to the private financial records of its political opponents and the donors who support them, as part of an unprecedented effort to claim that fundraising in support of election integrity may constitute wire fraud:
Officials with the committee said the day’s events cannot be viewed in a vacuum — and argued that the fundraising and political appeals that happened in the months leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, are a reason the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.“These people knew the claims they were making about the election were false but still sent emails anyways because it was an effective way to raise money,” a person familiar with the investigation said.
There are several major problems with this latest scheme from the committee to redefine legitimate election-integrity concerns as knowingly false claims of stolen elections. First, it is yet another brazen assault on the First Amendment rights of speech and political assembly. Second, it was not, in fact, false to say that the 2020 election was riddled with problems.
On the contrary, it is a conspiracy theory to say it didn’t have major problems, given the exorbitantly funded, widespread, and coordinated takeover of government election offices by Mark Zuckerberg-funded liberal groups to run Democrat get-out-the-vote operations. Hundreds of last-minute changes to election laws and procedures were pushed through — sometimes constitutionally, sometimes not — to intentionally flood the zone with tens of millions of mail-in ballots.
That’s to say nothing of a press that engaged in blatant propaganda for its political allies and against its political foes, and tech companies that meddled throughout the 2020 election with algorithmic manipulation, the deplatforming of the most effective conservative communicators, and Democrat-led censorship of stories harmful to political allies.
Democrats Fundraised Off the Russia Hoax
Most outlandishly, the Democratic National Committee itself was responsible for the wild conspiracy theory that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election, a lie many on the left peddled for years. And in 2018, the DNC even raised money off of the news that it filed a lawsuit against Trump and Russia for supposedly colluding to steal the 2016 election.
“The Democratic National Committee, in a lawsuit filed Friday, blamed the party’s fundraising woes during the 2016 presidential race on an nefarious plot, engineered by the Trump campaign, Russian officials and WikiLeaks, to disrupt the election,” said an April 2018 Associated Press report.
In fact, the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign had secretly funded the operation to develop the lie that the Trump campaign had engineered such a plot.
“During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russia launched an all-out assault on our democracy, and it found a willing and active partner in Donald Trump’s campaign,” DNC Chair Tom Perez falsely asserted about the DNC-funded hoax. “This constituted an act of unprecedented treachery: the campaign of a nominee for President of the United States in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the presidency.”
The damage to the country and even the world caused by that false and damaging stolen-election claim — which, again, was the result of a plot, secretly funded by the DNC and the Clinton campaign — was far greater than the one-day riot at the Capitol, or even the months-long Democrat riots during 2020 that destroyed cities, businesses, homes, monuments, and peace. Yet the Pelosi committee is only investigating the January riot and not the countless other riots that targeted Americans who are not members of Congress.
Democrats Cry ‘Rigged Election!’ All the Time
It’s not the only time that Democrats raised money off of false claims of stolen elections. They even did it in 2020 — the time period in which they’re seeking to criminalize the raising of funds to fight back against their well-funded operation to decrease election security.
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee head Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, D-N.Y., for example, sent multiple emails falsely claiming that Trump was “rigging” the 2020 election. A 2020 email from Maloney had the subject line, “Trump is RIGGING the Election.”
A similar email distributed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC claimed that Trump was “refus[ing] to have a ‘free and fair election.”
Maloney claimed in another email that Trump wanted to “RIG ELECTIONS FOR A DECADE,” (capitalization his). Former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, D-Fla., asked potential donors to “✎ SIGN-ON: Stop Trump from RIGGING elections.”
Maloney even claimed that debates were “RIGGED for Trump.”
Democrat Super PAC American Bridge promulgated a conspiracy theory that was popular among the party: “Donald Trump is making his motives crystal clear. He will undermine the United States Postal Service to rig this election.“
Even Pelosi got in on the action. Using recent news of the failure of a Democrat-run county in Georgia to properly administer a primary election, Pelosi claimed Republicans were engaged in “voter suppression.”
A few months later, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee used a Rachel Maddow report that mixed the Post Office conspiracy theory with a view that election security would undermine Democrat chances for victory, asserting “GOP returns to voter suppression playbook as November looms.”
The DSCC even had former President Barack Obama put out a fundraising appeal based on the claim that the GOP was engaged in widespread efforts “to rig elections.”
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee asserted Republicans were “rigging the voting laws” by “attempting to reinstate a voter photo ID law.” The same group claimed that the Kentucky GOP “just tried to rig Mitch McConnell’s re-election,” by having voter ID. It even said, “The GOP just rigged voting laws in a target state,” when Iowa passed voter ID laws. Incidentally, 80 percent of Americans support voter ID.
In another fundraising pitch, the Democratic Governors Association falsely claimed that cleaning up voter rolls to remove ineligible voters was a “voter suppression” tactic. Stacey Abrams sent a similar false fundraising email.
The Progressive Turnout Project accused Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of “TREASON!” and said he was “caught red-handed,” and “is guilty.” The fundraising appeal asked for help in sending McConnell to jail. The email said:
Mitch McConnell is Trump’s personal guardian in the Senate. He is openly breaking the law by violating his oath and his Constitutional duties. He’s practically taunting Democrats to do something about it.
In 2018, the DCCC sent out a fundraising email falsely claiming that Trump had fired Robert Mueller, the special counsel purportedly investigating the false claim that Trump stole the 2016 election by colluding with Russia.
Democrats Are Way Past Hypocrisy
If claiming elections were stolen were a crime, the entire Democrat Party and much of the media establishment would be in prison. After all, the last time the Democrats completely accepted a presidential election they lost was 1988.
But what the Democrats on the J6 Committee are doing is far worse than mere hypocrisy. This is not about how they always do what they then claim is beyond the pale when Republicans do something similar.
The real issue is that Democrats believe that elections they win are valid, and elections they lose are not. The only consistency in their actions and outcry is their ever-present belief that they are entitled to power.
That’s why there are no principles at stake for the J6 Committee. Getting rid of the pesky limits on their power is the only thing on the line, and they’ll do whatever they can to remove those, including criminalizing their political opponents for making factual statements about rigged elections.
https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/10/j6-committee-seeks-to-criminalize-republican-fundraising/
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