Griffin is the founder of Cowboys for Trump and a florid election conspiracist. In June Griffin led two other Otero County commissioners, both Republicans, in refusing to certify the county's primary election results. He based that refusal not on any actual evidence, but largely on vague misgivings about the accuracy of Dominion voting machines.
The New Mexico Supreme Court eventually ordered the commissioners to certify the election, which two of them–but not Griffin–did. Griffin has had various brushes with the law, but none of this certification nonsense was what finally got him booted. Griffin attended the Jan. 6 riot and was convicted of trespassing on restricted federal grounds. A few citizens, backed up by the government transparency group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), sued under a state law that allows lawsuits against government officials who violate their offices.
That's when District Judge Francis J. Mathew ruled that Griffin was disqualified from his commissioner job under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. That's the Civil War–era part, as BtV readers know, that bars public officials who swear to defend the Constitution but then do an insurrection or rebellion, from holding public office. The big deal here is Mathew found that Jan. 6 was, in the legal sense, an insurrection and that Griffin's participation meant he could never hold office again.
This is a big deal, especially since courts in other jurisdictions have refused to apply the 14th Amendment to other pro-insurrection officials, including, this week, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. The January 6 committee, before the year is out, is expected to complete a report detailing Donald Trump's intimate role in fomenting and leading a coup attempt and sending the mob to the Capitol on Jan. 6. Whether Griffin's ouster influences other judges to apply the Jan. 6 example to the 2024 front-runner is the thing to watch.
A real Georgia breach
More from the ongoing story of how teams of computer experts directed by Trump lawyers perpetrated a massive breach of Georgia voting data and equipment in the days after the 2020 election. Now it appears the same team was behind a data breach in rural Coffee County, and was paid by disgraced Trump lawyer Sidney Powell to be there.
Surveillance cameras captured a pair of data consultants entering the county elections office on Jan. 7, 2021. And wouldn't you know it, one of the consultants is none other than Doug Logan, the former CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the group that conducted the infamous partisan ballot review that failed to find any voter fraud but inspired insipid audits and investigations in other states. Those guys are also involved in similar efforts to breach voting machines in Michigan. The footage also shows several employees from the data forensics firm SullivanStrickler entering the offices. That firm billed Powell for their activities, according to records surfaced by a huge lawsuit alleging poor election security in Georgia. The whole thing has now turned into criminal investigations in both Georgia and Michigan…
…which makes it extra weird that a voting machine from Michigan's Antrim County, ground zero for the Trumpist data breach, showed up on eBay after being stolen. Apparently a dude in Ohio bought the machine from Goodwill for $7.99 and flipped it for $1,200. A well-known voting-machine security expert bought the thing, then reported it to authorities.
Full takeover
How many election deniers are running for office in your state? This handy and altogether terrifying tool from Fivethirtyeight shows that a full 60 percent of GOP candidates running this fall either fully deny or refuse to endorse the results of the 2020 election.
In all, 6 in 10 voters will have an election denier on their ballot this fall. That's horrible anywhere, but a huge deal in swing states like Arizona and Michigan, where full-on conspiracists are running for governor and secretary of state. Then there's Pennsylvania…
They put the Q in Harrisburg
Pennsylvania GOP governor candidate Doug Mastriano attended Jan. 6, loves to tweet QAnon hashtags, and has fully endorsed stolen-election lies. Now meet the full-on Q devotee Mastriano is likely to appoint secretary of state if he wins in November.
VICE's Cam Joseph has the story of Toni Shuppe, the PA mom who admits that being at home during COVID sent her deep down internet rabbit holes that spun out her brain on conspiracies ranging from stolen elections to Pizzagate. Shuppe got active in QAnon conspiracies and election fraud, pushed audit petitions, and now appears to be in line to be Mastriano's secretary of state.
Shuppe has posted about how a 10-part QAnon documentary opened her eyes to a global cabal of elites running a child sex trafficking ring. Bottom line, according to Cam: "If Mastriano wins this fall, the administration of the 2024 presidential election in the nation's largest swing state could be in the hands of two QAnon-linked, election-denying conspiracy theorists who are hell-bent on upending the current election system."
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