A relatively obscure House committee is setting the stage for a 2024 coup, and—as you might expect—2020 election deniers are orchestrating the project. This time, the plot begins inside the Administration Committee, usually considered the housekeeper for the House. It sees to the printing of the Congressional Record, assigns offices, helps manage information systems, handles the parking infrastructure—that kind of thing. It also, unfortunately, is the parent committee of the Subcommittee on Elections, which oversees federal election matters, including “campaign finance, voting rights, election administration, and election security." You see the problem with putting Republicans in charge of that, right?
The committee recently hired a guy named Thomas Lane as Elections Counsel & Director of Election Coalitions. If you paid close attention to the Department of Justice’s investigation into the Trump plot to overturn the 2020 election, you’ll remember Lane as one of the people subpoenaed for his role in the fake electors scheme in Arizona. Lane was a Trump campaign staffer in Arizona and New Mexico in 2020. He also recently served as the “director of election integrity” for the Virginia GOP. Now he’s getting $155,000 in taxpayer-funded salary to plot the path for a 2024 coup, and he’s not even really trying to cover his tracks.
One of the things Lane is doing to earn that salary is helping arrange hearings for the committee, doing things like identifying witnesses and drafting questions for committee members. Last week, the committee held a hearing titled “American Confidence in Elections: State Tools to Promote Voter Confidence.”
That’s clearly code for voter suppression, which we know because Hans Von Spakovsky was one of the chief witnesses. Spakovsky has been the tip of the spear for Republican voter suppression efforts since rising to prominence in the George W. Bush administration. Bush used a recess appointment to put Spakovsky on the Federal Election Commission in 2006—a reward for his efforts as counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. Spakovsky improperly used that position to advocate in political battles in the states, specifically to force strict voter ID laws, so of course he was rewarded.
Spakovsky was also on hand for the scandal that ended in then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ resignation in 2007. Gonzales improperly purged a slew of U.S. attorneys because they refused to launch bogus voter-fraud investigations and prosecutions in key states.
There’s a direct through-line from Spakovsky to the Trump team's efforts to steal the 2020 election to the current House elections oversight committee, and it runs through people like Spakovsky and a newer name: Cleta Mitchell. Yes, the Cleta Mitchell who was on that infamous Trump telephone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the call where Trump demanded Raffensperger “find 11,780 votes” for him to overturn the election in that state.
Mitchell was forced to resign from her law firm after that call was made public, but she landed on her feet. Through sheer extortion, she secured a seat on the advisory board of the Election Assistance Commission, an independent government agency that provides voluntary election guidelines for states. She got that seat from her position on the board of another independent agency, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
That puts her in a position to coordinate with Lane on the Administration Committee. She’s thrilled about the opportunity to work with them, she told a recent meeting of the Election Assistance Committee. “They’ve been wonderful about working with and helping to educate volunteers and citizen activists on weekly calls,” she said. She’s working with the committee on her “Election Integrity Network” project, basically a tool for recruiting and training people to interfere with and intimidate elections officials and poll workers, what they call “election observer access.”
That’s not all Mitchell’s been working on. Here’s a recent recording of her telling a room full of Republican donors how GOP state legislatures should be changing voting laws to “combat” voting on college campuses.
The Republicans have succeeded in putting a who’s who of voter suppressors and election deniers in charge of “election integrity” to further their plans for stealing the next election and they aren’t even trying to hide it.
Published with permission of Daily Kos
