Greg Palast: Recent Episodes

Greg Palast

Greg Palast is an investigative reporter, whose news-breaking stories appear on BBC Television, The Guardian, Al Jazeera and Rolling Stone Magazine. You can read and watch his reports at GregPalast.com.

Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," "Billionaires & Ballot Bandits," "Armed Madhouse," and the highly acclaimed "Vultures' Picnic." His full-length feature film, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," was released in 2016.

If the new vote suppression tactics first used by Brian Kemp in Georgia — and exposed in investigative reporter Greg Palast’s new film Vigilante — are allowed to spread across the United States, then vote suppression, not the voters, will pick the next president. In this episode of the KPFK Lawyers Guild Show, hosts Jim Lafferty and Maria Hall talk to Palast about the new existential threats to our democracy.

Will Georgia DA Fani Willis secure a conviction in her case against Donald Trump? Or will venue-shopping help Trump secure a more amenable jury pool to help him evade conviction?

Donald Trump and 18 others have been indicted by Fulton County District Attorney, Fani Willis, under RICO organized crime statues for trying to fix the 2020 presidential elections. Greg Palast reports from Oklahoma on the RICO indictment and on the planned right-wing high-jacking of the Native American vote in 2024.

“The RICO statutes are designed to find the spider in the middle of the web, and there's one spider, an orange spider, in the middle of this web.”

Learn more at GregPalast.com

Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, has just announced he’s removing 191,473 voters from the Georgia voter rolls. In the press release, Raffensperger boasts that Georgia has the “Cleanest voter lists in America” — of course, they've bleached them whiter than white.

Meanwhile, as reported by Meidas Touch host Fred Wellman, a right wing data miner has filed an Open Records request for “Copies of the signature cards used in the election process” — for ALL 7 million Georgia voters — including “the voter's name, address, and signature.” This is very dangerous. I presume it’s for the purpose of mass vigilante challenges to ballots.

And it's not just about Georgia. The Peach State is the GOP's test kitchen for vote suppression trickery, which they then roll out nationwide.

Vote suppression is class war by other means. It's about power and resources. They're not stealing votes to steal elections. They're stealing votes to steal the money.

Stay informed, sign up to our FREE newsletter at: GregPalast.com/subscribe

When ProPublica reported on the undeclared luxury fishing trip Justice Samuel Alito took courtesy of billionaire Vulture Fund manager Paul Singer, they reported there was a major conflict of interest with a case that Singer brought in front of the Supreme Court against the Nation of Argentina (which I wrote about in my book Billionaires & Ballot Bandits). But they failed to mention another very important case Singer was involved in.

Singer's big goal in influencing the judiciary was to overturn the Voting Rights Act. He was a big promoter of Shelby v. Holder. Now, Shelby, Alabama didn’t have the money to take the case to the Supreme Court, it came from two groups of donors: the Koch Brothers, through Donors Trust, and Paul Singer, through the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank which he funds and pretty much directs.

So, Shelby v. Holder, the most devastating decision against voting rights, was directly created and propagated by Singer. His fishing buddy, Justice Alito should have recused himself. That would've changed the outcome, because the decision was made 5 to 4, with Alito's being the surprise deciding vote.

Alito should not have been on that case, and if he'd recused himself — as he should have done — we would still have the full Voting Rights Act.

▶️ Get the full story. Download my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy — available for FREE for a limited time.

On June 25th, 2013 the US Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, when they ruled 5 to 4 that Section 4 was unconstitutional. The case, Shelby v. Holder, was financed in part by multi-billionaire hedge fund manager Paul “The Vulture” Singer.

Earlier this week, ProPublica revealed that Singer flew Justice Samuel Alito on his private jet to Alaska for a luxury fishing vacation in early 2008 (a gift which Alito failed to disclose). Singer subsequently had multiple cases before Alito and the Supreme Court — including a 15-year long dispute with the nation of Argentina. Justice Alito also just happened to be the surprise deciding vote on Shelby v. Holder.

That was Singer's holy grail, to destroy the Voting Rights Act, because he knew it was the key to Republican vote suppression efforts. Indeed, the entire vote suppression effort that we've been reporting on for the past decade relied on the destruction of the Voting Rights Act.

▶️ Get the full story. Download my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy — available for FREE for a limited time.

Trump's been indicted for mishandling classified documents. Charges include Obstruction of Justice and violation of Espionage Act — but will he serve time?

"I have now read this indictment three times — and remember I was a Justice Department investigator and I've been in many litigations on these big cases — and I've never seen such an indictment," says Greg Palast. "I don't see how Trump gets out of this unless he's Houdini... But I'm very concerned that the clock is Trump's friend."

In this week's edition of the Election Crimes Bulletin, Greg Palast and FlashPoints News host Dennis J. Bernstein discuss special counsel Jack Smith’s case, and the likelihood that it will result in jail time for Trump.

I did a massive investigation of the late, defrocked "Reverend" Pat Robertson, who died on Thursday at the age of 93 and was, weirdly, a fan of mine. I wrote the exposé for The Guardian and had secretly recorded Robertson admitting to several financial crimes.

He had raised millions of dollars from his flock, the 700 Club (which was named after those who donated $700 a year). They raised millions for “Operation Blessing”, supposedly to help alleviate the woes of refugees fleeing genocide in Rwanda.

“Operation Blessing” then purchased planes, ostensibly to shuttle medical supplies in and out of the refugee camp in Goma, Congo (then Zaire). However, investigative reporter Bill Sizemore of the Virginian-Pilot discovered that, except for one medical flight, the planes were used to haul heavy equipment for something called the African Development Corporation, a diamond mining operation distant from Goma.

African Development was owned by Pat Robertson.

Get the full "Diamonds for the Antichrist" story at Greg Palast.com

In addition, as those who've seen my film The Assassination of Hugo Chavez know, the ex-Reverend called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez. Why would he care so much about removing Chavez? Because Chavez refused to give Robertson a gold mining concession in Venezuela.

Watch The Assassination of Hugo Chavez using this FREE download link.

Robertson also gave us the phrase "New World Order", for George Bush Senior's New World Order creation that would replace the Communist world order after the Cold War. And it was Robertson who warned us that there was a cabal of bankers, Presbyterians, the Federal Reserve, and the US Senate Finance Committee who are taking their orders directly from Satan. Now, I should note that the chairman of the banking committee who helped create the Federal Reserve was Pat Robertson's father; Absalom Willis Robertson was a Senator, was chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, and helped create the Federal Reserve Board. So, Pat Robertson basically saw his father as Satan’s Commander on Earth.

But it’s no joke, because we all paid the price for the Christian Coalition’s “good works”. The Christian Coalition illegally backed George Bush Senior for president by sending out tens of millions of pieces of mail to Born Again Christians telling them to vote for George Herbert Walker Bush.

Robertson deserves credit, if you wanna call it credit, for recreating the Republican Party as an adjunct of the Christian Coalition, and making Born Again Christians supreme — basically kingmakers — within the Republican Party.

I spent all day with Robertson, with my concealed recorder, and because he said that God asked him to run for president, I asked him, with a campaign manager like the Lord, how could you lose? And he said, well, the Lord asked me to run for president, not to win. Out of that run, I created a mailing list of 3 million people.

The Christian Coalition grew out of Robertson’s presidential campaign, and as Robertson said, now no Republican can run for dog catcher without the Christian Coalition's approval. So, Robertson may be gone, but the dead hand of the Christian Right is running the Republican party — and that was Robertson’s goal.

For those who want to read the full investigation, which was also in my book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, I’m offering a FREE download of the audiobook, in which Al Franken reads the chapter about the ex-Reverend Pat.

It’s easy to make fun of Donald Trump’s brain vomit unleashed on CNN Wednesday. But one of his Big Fibs is seriously threatening the 2024 election.

Trump said: “If you look at True the Vote, they found millions of votes on camera, on government cameras, where they were stuffing ballot boxes. … Look at what happened in Atlanta, millions of votes, and all you have to do is take a look at government cameras. You will see them, people going to 28 different voting booths to vote, to put in seven ballots apiece. I mean, and they’re all on camera.”

The Palast Investigative team took on this very claim in our film Vigilante: Georgia’s Vote Suppression Hitman.

Trump’s claim of one guy stuffing ballots into “28 voting booths” (he meant, absentee ballot dropboxes) comes, as he says, from the Texas group of self-proclaimed vote fraud vigilantes True the Vote, producers of the film 2000 Mules, premiered by Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

In 2000 Mules, as sinister music plays, we see a Black man get out of his car, approach a ballot drop box—and put in his vote.

Yes, it’s all on camera Mr. Ex-President. It’s a lot of shots of Black men…voting, putting their ballots in the box. One of them, Mark Andrews, an Atlanta tech exec., who was hunted down by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation because of the Trump/True the Vote claim, has now sued True the Vote for defamation—and they have not denied he was falsely accused. (Andrews had placed his ballot in the box along with his wife’s and three adult kids’ ballots.)

It’s very satisfying to say, as the CNN pundits do, that Trump is lying, that this ballot-box stuffing claim by True the Vote has been “de-bunked.” But what preening pundits leave out is that Trump’s claims have been astonishingly effective in changing laws to coldly block Black voting.

▶️ Get the full story at GregPalast.com

This week it’s been revealed that Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis has done immunity deals with at least 8 of the 16 fraudulent electors involved in the scheme to fix the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.

In this week’s show investigative journalist Greg Palast and host Dennis J. Bernstein also talk about how Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is punishing the victims with his recent interest rate hike.

For more on that, read "Powell’s Bag of Leeches: Hiking interest, the Medieval cure for inflation” at GregPalast.com

What happened in the Dominion case against Fox? What about Smartmatic, the voting machine company which Hugo Chavez helped launch that’s also suing Fox? Why has Fulton County DA Fani Willis filed a motion to remove the attorney representing 10 of the Georgia fraudulent electors? And what’s happening with Ali Alexander? Why was he banned from Twitter — again!?!

I hate to rain on the parade, but Trump’s indictment — even felony conviction — will not bar Trump from holding office. While I’ve reported on Trump as a one-man crime wave, the cold truth is, if convicted, it will be his first offense for low-level felony — so forget jail time.

Other problems with New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg's case...

The prosecutor has to prove that Trump INTENDED to hush up his affair to save his election — as opposed to saving him from the Wrath of Melania.

This is nearly identical to the case of ex-Sen. John Edwards [D-NC] who paid off the girlfriend he got pregnant during his run for President and for Vice-President (as John Kerry’s running mate). The jury didn’t buy the line that hush money was a hidden campaign contribution. The case was then dropped.

And let’s not sugar-coat the problems for prosecutors in Manhattan. Their two key witnesses are creeps: Michael Cohen, a convicted felon knuckle-breaker for Trump, and Stormy Daniels, a woman who blackmailed Trump into paying hush money. (On the other hand, Cohen and Daniels come off as sincere and contrite about their affairs with The Donald.)

A similar problem arises with the case in Georgia, which will soon go to a new grand jury. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis will have to PROVE that Trump KNEW he’d lost the election and KNEW that he was committing a crime by promoting a bogus slate of Electors to the Electoral College.

When Trump said to the Sec. of State of Georgia, "find 11,780 votes," it was preceded by Trump’s crazy-town claims about illegal voters. Trump’s lawyers will argue, in the UNLIKELY case he’s indicted, that Agent Orange was relying on a legal memo by professor of law John Eastman. They’ll also claim that Trump truly believed the goofy BS about stuffed ballot boxes and illegal voters from grifter groups like True the Vote.

Sorry to give you the bad news about the prosecutions. But that’s why they call it LAW school and not JUSTICE school.

Georgia is on our minds — again —this week on the Election Crimes Bulletin, with new GOP laws to eliminate absentee voting by dropbox (SB 221), to stop the use of (unfortunately) much-needed donations to support election administration (SB 222), and to create a new Georgia commission to restrict and remove prosecutors (SB 92). The later law is clearly aimed at curtailing the activities of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who’s investigating criminal interference in Georgia’s 2020 presidential election by Donald Trump and his cronies, and is edging ever closer to indictments.

Meanwhile the Biden Administration has joined Fair Fight, the voting rights organization founded by Georgia’s should-have-been-governor Stacey Abrams, in their legal action against True the Vote, the right wing "election integrity" organization that attempted to overturn the 2020 and 2022 elections with mass voter challenges. Earlier this month, US District Court Judge Steve C. Jones ordered True the Vote to stand trial in Atlanta. In his summary judgment, Judge Jones noted that even True the Vote’s so-called expert, Gregg Phillips, “candidly admits that there will be voters on the challenge list that are eligible to vote.” But it remains to be seen how far the Biden Administration will go to support Fair Fight’s action against True the Vote and its army of vigilante vote challengers, which we exposed before the 2022 election in on our film, Vigilante.

Also in the news is Ginni Thomas, the wife of US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who’s raised new ethics questions after it was revealed that Crowdsourcers for Culture and Liberty, a conservative think tank led by her, accepted anonymous donations totaling $596,000 in 2019. Much of the money, $400,000, came via Donors Trust, an organization that has long been on the radar of the Palast Investigations team. As a funnel for Koch funds, Donors Trust had a prominent role in our 2016 film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

Learn all about this and more on the latest edition of the Election Crimes Bulletin with Dennis Bernstein and Greg Palast.

As things heat up for Donal Trump on the legal front, we take a look at the possible indictments heading his way from New York and Georgia. Though it looks like New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg might pip Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis to the post with his case involving Trump’s payoff to adult film star Stormy Daniels, it’s perhaps the possible Georgia indictment that’s proving to be more intriguing. Especially since this past week it was revealed that the Georgia Grand Jury was played a recording of a call Trump made in December 2020 to then-Georgia House Speaker David Ralston (who since died in November 2022) asking him to convene a special session of the state legislature to overturn Georgia's presidential election results. Meanwhile New York Attorney General Leticia James has revived the case Bragg controversially dropped in February 2022 involving faked financial documents. Though James’ action is civil rather than criminal, the case extends beyond the former-president to three of his children — Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Eric Trump — and could see them all barred from doing business in New York.

“It’s in front of him” may be the words that finally send Donald Trump to the hoosegow. The focus of Fulton County District Attorney, Fani Willis' Grand Jury investigation was on the scheme to present a fraudulent slate of Electors to Congress (which VP Mike Pence was supposed to select for the Electoral College). And, according to the January 6th Committee report, RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel sent an "elector recap" memo to Trump summarizing the scheme, based on a phone call between McDaniel, lawyer John Eastman, and the then President. Crucially, a Trump aide told McDaniel, "It’s in front of him." Years back, I was principal investigator on a major RICO conspiracy case in Georgia, where the state's racketeering law is tougher than federal law. I cannot see how Trump avoids state RICO charges — as the instigator of the fraud who has, apparently, signed off on the plans for the Electoral vote heist.

The 800-page gorilla of a report from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the Capitol seems strangely silent on a few matters that, apparently, were a bit too uncomfortable for the Committee to take on.

So, buckle up for a discomfiting ride with our investigative team that has been tracking the insurrectionists for years before the Insurrection in this Special Edition of the Election Crimes Bulletin with FlashPoints host Denis J. Bernstein, investigative journalist Greg Palast, and Palast Investigative Fund researcher and photojournalist Zach D. Roberts.

For more on this, read our report: The Secret History of a Riot.

In the latest edition of the Election Crimes Bulletin, investigative journalist Greg Palast and FlashPoints News host Dennis J. Bernstein discuss the mainstream media’s fear of real news, and what's missing from their headlines on stories ranging from the George Santos scandal to the recently released transcripts from the January 6 Committee.

Talking of huge stories the mainstream media fail to report... Our documentary, Vigilante: Georgia's Vote Suppression Hitman, will be available online through New Year's Day. After that, for contractual reasons, we have to take it down. It’s free for these next couple of days – then gone! Go to: VigilanteMovie.com

Watch it and pass on the link.

Finally. The Department of Justice has finally taken on ‘True the Vote’, the right-wing group behind the wrongful challenge of hundreds of thousands of legal Georgia voters. True the Vote challenges were the central subject of the film Vigilante: Georgia’s Vote Suppression Hitman created by the Palast Investigative Fund team.

I know what you’re thinking: Why did Justice sue two weeks AFTER the Georgia runoff election?

Luckily, the film and our related reports got out in Georgia before the election. We held special voter impact showings from Coffee County to Gwinnett to Valdosta. Crucially, we confronted and exposed True the Vote’s agents, every one a Republican official, scaring them away from further challenges.

Watch Vigilante for no charge, through New Year’s Day at: VigilanteMovie.com

As control of the Senate hangs in the balance, once again, the balance of power may be decided in Georgia. And once again, as in 2020, Reverend Raphael Warnock [D] is headed for a runoff race — but this time the rules of the game have been changed. In March 2021, Brian Kemp signed a 98-page voter-suppression bill, SB202, which places severe restrictions on absentee ballots and dropboxes, and has unleashed an army of self-appointed GOP vote vigilantes, who are challenging voters en masse. Adding to the odds against a fair fight, convenient errors have come to light which affect thousands of voters. For example, in Cobb County, the ACLU found that 1,036 absentee ballots were never mailed. And under SB202, the rules for the runoff election itself have changed, with the time frame being shortened from 9 weeks to just 4, meaning the election will now be held on Dec 6, instead of in January as it was two years ago. This change may seem benign, but it will deny thousands of young and new voters, who may have wanted to vote in the runoff race, the chance to do so, since SB202 also requires voters to register at least 30 days before an election — and, in this case, the runoff election is one that voters only had 28 days notice of. As the head of the New Georgia Project, Kendra Cotton, said of democracy in Georgia: It’s death by a thousand cuts. On December 6th, we may find out if democracy in Georgia has already taken its final gasp.

For updates on the situation in Georgia, sign up to our newsletter at: GregPalast.com/subscribe

Vigilante voter strikes are not just happening in Georgia, where Greg Palast centered his new documentary, Vigilante: Georgia's Vote Suppression Hitman. But the vigilantes are using different tactics in different states. In states with open carry laws, like Arizona, they’re actually showing up at early voting stations and dropbox sites with guns and masks to intimidate voters. Arizona may have an open carry law, but it’s still part of the United States of America, which means that the state is subject to the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which was specifically says you cannot use any threat of violence to intimidate voters.

In this edition of the Election Crimes Bulletin, investigative journalist Greg Palast and FlashPoints News host Dennis J. Bernstein discuss this new wave of vigilante voter suppression.

The duo also delve into Justice Clarence Thomas’ recent ruling, which gives Lindsay Graham a temporary stay from having to testify before the grand jury in Atlanta which is investigating whether Trump and his allies tried to illegally influence and undermine the results of the 2020 election in Georgia. Thomas knows even this Supreme Court will likely to overturn his ruling, but he’s given Graham a critical vacation from testifying until after the midterms. This is good news for Brian Kemp, who’s campaign might otherwise be in jeopardy if inconvenient truths about his conversations Graham were to come out before the November election.

Learn more at: GregPalast.com

Vigilante: Georgia’s Voter Suppression Hitman, exposes the most brazen, racist attack on voting rights yet.

Support our work by donating for a signed DVD of the film.

Or make a simple donation no matter how large or small to help us get the word out!

Brian Kemp, the governor of Georgia, signed a law saying you can’t teach Critical Race Theory. Why? As we revealed in the film, Vigilante: Georgia’s Vote Suppression Hitman, it was his family that first brought enslaved Africans to Georgia.

This was just before the Revolutionary War, when Georgia was a free territory. Slavery was prohibited in Georgia, and Georgia at that time included Alabama and Mississippi. Then the Kemp family cut a deal with the King of England to bring in Africans from the rice coast, because the English settlers had no idea how to grow rice. These Africans were the high tech workers of their time, they were the ones who knew how to grow rice. Rice was king before cotton in the South. So, the Kemp family's fortune, the Governor's fortune, comes from enslaving other people — that’s where the power of his family comes from, and that’s why he’s so keen to erase history.

Join me for a special, one-night only impact screening of Vigilante: Georgia's Vote Suppression Hitman — narrated by Rosario Dawson — in Los Angeles on Weds, Oct 26 at 7PM. Entry is FREE with RSVP. Can't make the screening? Get a signed DVD with donation to support our work.

Atlanta attorney CK Hoffler serves as counsel to civil rights icon Reverend Jesse Jackson and is Chairwoman of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition’s board. She’s the former President of the National Bar Association and has been at the forefront of the fight for voting rights in Georgia and beyond. In this week’s Election Crimes Bulletin, Hoffler talks about the challenges Georgia voters face at the polls in November. Having seen a preview of Palast’s new film, Vigilante: Georgia’s Vote Suppression Hitman, Hoffler also discusses the vigilante voter challenges unleashed on Georgians by Governor Brian Kemp and his SB202 anti-voting law, which the documentary exposed.

“I think the way that you juxtaposed the actual people who were victims with the people who were the perpetrators of this voter suppression was nothing short of brilliant,” says Hoffler to Palast. “And then, of course, to expose and to have the country understand the history of Brian Kemp and his family, being the family who brought slavery to the state of Georgia… it was also something that was masterfully done. I think everyone needs to see this movie. It’s not just about Georgia, but it’s relevant to what’s happening in this country today.”

Vigilante: Georgia’s Voter Suppression Hitman, exposes the most brazen, racist attack on voting rights yet.

Support our work by donating for a signed DVD of the film.

Or make a simple donation no matter how large or small to help us get the word out!

Find out if you’ve been challenged, visit: SaveMyVote2022.org and search the 2022 Georgia challenge list.

Warning: The challenges continue, so bookmark the SaveMyVote2022 website and keep checking back!

On Thursday, Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, appeared before the January 6 Committee to testify about her role in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

Ginni sent 29 text messages that we know about, and possibly more, to Trump's Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in the weeks after the election encouraging him to subvert the will of the people. She was also in communication with Trump lawyer John Eastman, who wrote the infamous memo which argued that the Constitution’s 12th Amendment gave then Vice President, Mike Pence, the discretion to decide which states’ electoral votes should be counted.

Ginni's husband later refused to recuse himself when SCOTUS was asked to rule on whether Trump and his cronies had to release documents to January 6 Committee investigators. When SCOTUS published its ruling, it showed Clarence supported Trump's request to suppress the documents — and, significantly, was the sole dissenting voice.

In this episode of the Elections Crimes Bulletin, Bernstein and Palast discuss this conflict of interest and the potential legal ramifications.

On National Voter Registration Day, investigative journalist Greg Palast and Flashpoints host Dennis Bernstein ponder the big question: Why do we even have voter registration?

We didn't always have registration of voters in America. It started pretty much in Pennsylvania when they were trying to stop Black people who had been moving up from the South from voting. Registration was initially only in the cities for city dwellers. You had the Italian immigrants, the Black diaspora coming up from the South, and then in New York you had Jews. Registration was something that was meant for minorities, for working people, for immigrants to give them a hurdle. In fact, when New York City first started registrations, they only allowed you to register on Saturday, which was a way to stop Jews from registering to vote.

It's a crime to vote if you're not American, a go to jail crime. There is no reason for these laws, except the value of registration is to stop people from voting. And the real value of registration is to remove people's registration, the so-called purge, like the enema of the voter rules.

So, registration itself is the number one vote suppression horror show in America, and it hasn't been here forever. And by the way, North Dakota has no voter registration and you don't see a bunch of Canadians rushing in and picking their governor. You don't see moose or buffalo crowding the polling stations. Without voter registration, somehow they have fair and clean elections. So, why do we have registration? So we can remove registrations and stop people from voting.

Stay informed in the run up to the midterms. Subscribe to our newsletter.

It all comes down to Georgia. Fani Willis, the Fulton County District Attorney, just laid out her case against Donald Trump. Reverend Warnock is running for reelection in a race that will determine who controls the United States Senate. Stacey Abrams is having a rematch with Governor Brian Kemp, who's been attempting to tip the scales in his favor by bringing felony charges against Black election workers and enacting a new anti-voter law, SB202, which (among other things) has unleashed mass challenges to the votes of over a quarter million Georgians. And we're premiering our new film, Vigilante: Georgia's Voter Suppression Hitman, in Atlanta on October 5 to get the word out before the midterm elections about Kemp's most brazen, racist attack on voting rights yet. So, Georgia's where the battle for the future of the United States is being fought on multiple fronts!

If Donald Trump and Brian Kemp succeed in using electioneering as an excuse to wriggle out of indictments and grand jury subpoenas, then running for office will become the ultimate get out of jail free card, which will open up a whole new can of worms.

The idea of ERIC was to expand voter registration. If you moved, they would follow you and say, hey, would you like to register in your new state? That's very good. That's very progressive. In fact, a bunch of liberals from the Pew Trust and Brennan Center came up with it. But now a number of Republican Secretaries of State have taken it over and inverted it. Instead of asking people, would you like to register, they're using the ERIC lists, which are often wrong, to remove voters by the millions, basically creating a Crosscheck replacement.

I did an investigation for Black Voters Matter in Wisconsin, where Joe Biden’s victory margin was only 20,000 votes in 2020. Before the election, they were going to remove 130,000 voters from the rolls. We went through the ERIC-generated lists and found just short of 40,000 people had never moved — a minimum 25.8% error rate. Almost every person at risk in Milwaukee was in a black census district, while those in Madison were mostly students — their only crime was either being a student or voting while Black.

Biden would've lost Wisconsin if the ERIC purge was allowed to go through. In 2020, after presenting our evidence in a report with Black Voters Matter, we managed to get the Wisconsin Supreme Court to block the Wisconsin purge, but now ERIC’s back and active in more states than ever!

It seems a mystery. Why is Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia playing hide and seek with the Atlanta grand jury investigating whether Trump and associates attempted to tamper with the 2020 election results?

Why is the Governor resisting the subpoena? After all, the national press has played Kemp as some kind of hero for allegedly standing up to Trump, refusing to overturn Georgia’s majority for Joe Biden.

But Kemp is no hero. The reality: Kemp and his elections chief played games with Georgia’s voting process — for Trump and for their own political careers. They only refused Trump’s post-election demands they knew would have put them at risk of hard time on a chain gang.

Kemp’s resistance to testifying seems all the more odd because Fulton County (Atlanta) District Attorney Fani Willis has bent over backwards to accommodate the skittish pol. Because he was moaning about the time taken away from campaigning against Stacey Abrams, she agreed he could appear by video. And, surprisingly, Willis was going to let his attorney sit with him, something a grand jury witness is almost never permitted.

Kemp has gone crying to a judge pleading he shouldn’t have to answer questions about calls made to him by Trump and cronies. Kemp claims “sovereign immunity” — the right of kings not to answer questions, reserved in the US for official state actions. He claims “executive privilege” as if being CEO of Georgia is grounds to conceal evidence of a crime. He claims it would take time from his campaign — that’s one I’ve never heard in court. If that succeeds, we’ll have even more crooks run for office.

It’s always dangerous to speculate on what’s going on in Brian Kemp’s brain, but let me suggest that he knows his benign status as mere “witness” may quickly change to something far more serious.

If Trump, as reported, demanded the Governor call a special session of the legislature to de-certify Joe Biden’s victory, and Kemp told him to go fly, then Kemp’s off the hook. So, why not tell that to the grand jury?

Kemp reportedly told Trump that, as Governor, Kemp could not de-certify the presidential vote. Then was it Kemp who suggested Trump make those calls to the man who did have the power to reject the vote count?

Question: Governor, did you suggest that Trump call the Secretary of State?

Question: Governor, did you suggest to Mr. Trump that, while Georgia law does not allow you to interfere, you intended to change the law?

Question: Governor, you have yet to turn over all notes and information about the Trump de-certification campaign. What happened to those records?

How could Kemp answer? Take the Fifth? Not wise for a sitting governor. Does he fudge it with, “I don’t recall”? Bad idea: Strategic forgetfulness is an indictable offence.

The most dangerous question would be whether Trump told him about, or asked for help with, sending a slate of fake Georgia “electors” to the Electoral College. That’s the highly technical core of the DA’s potential racketeering case against Giuliani and friends: submitting names of Electors who were never elected, who never even appeared on the ballot. Some Trump Electors, the official ones who ran on the November ballot, refused to have their names sent to Congress — so the Trump gang just manufactured a phony Elector list.

If Trump mentioned the scheme to create a fake set of Electors, and Kemp “forgot” to tell the DA, we could imagine Kemp listed as an unindicted co-conspirator. Not a winning campaign slogan: “Re-elect Kemp: Named but unindicted!”

Get the full story at GregPalast.com

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is resisting a grand jury subpoena from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is investigating criminal interference in Georgia’s 2020 election by Donald Trump and his cronies. The question is why?

Indeed, we wouldn’t even have known that Kemp had been subpoenaed for the closed-door hearing if wasn’t for the 121-page motion his legal team filed with the Fulton County Superior Court. After refusing to provide sworn testimony by video in July, Willis’ office emailed Kemp’s lawyer Brian McEvoy on August 9, compelling Kemp to testify this past Thursday, August 18. However, his legal team filed a motion to quash the subpoena, which raises some real questions given that Willis had described Kemp as a “mere witness”. What question is Kemp trying to avoid answering under oath? What’s he trying to hide?

TRANSCRIPT Dennis Bernstein Greg, you are honed in like a laser beam in Atlanta, and that lady there ain’t messing around — that is for damn sure. The District Attorney there ain’t taken no junk from no one. We’re gonna see some interesting things unfolding. Let’s just start with the new developments around Trump’s attempt to overturn the election…What does Brian Kemp’s name have to do with this? Why is he suddenly in the middle?

Greg Palast Well, very big news, and he’s put himself in the middle. Fani Willis is the District Attorney of Fulton County, which is the big hunk of Atlanta, and she is investigating whether Trump illegally tried to overturn the election in Georgia. She hasn’t named him yet, or even subpoenaed him — named him as a target — but she has named Lindsay Graham and others, including Rudy Giuliani. Rudy Giuliani was forced to testify yesterday before her grand jury.

Now, understand that the complaint against her, by Trump and Kemp and everyone else, is that this is political, these subpoenas, this whole investigation…And they keep saying, “Atlanta Democrat” — that’s code word for Black. She’s a Black woman, but all of her actions have been approved and ordered by Republican justices.

Now she’s subpoenaed Brian Kemp, this is interesting. Brian Kemp is the Governor of Georgia, he’s running for reelection against Stacey Abrams, and he’s also the star of my film Vigilantes: George’s Vote Suppression Hitman. And so why is Kemp involved in this? Because, here’s the interesting thing: Kemp was the guy who did say he thought the election was probably correct. Understand that Trump had called him several times, as well as the Secretary of State, to say overturn the election, that is don’t call a special session of the legislature and don’t certify the results. In other words, don’t send anyone to the electoral college for Georgia. Kemp said that’s against the Georgia constitution, I have no authority to call a special session, I have no authority to overturn and decertify this election.

You have to understand it’s not like Kemp doesn’t love Trump. Trump endorsed him, they were hand in hand, cheek to cheek when Kemp was running for governor against Stacey Abrams. They were very close. Kemp was a massive supporter of Trump’s reelection in Georgia. But, apparently, he wasn’t willing to go to prison for Agent Orange. Now, the question is, what’s going on here with the subpoena?

Bernstein Well, let’s, let’s talk about the subpoena, but first just say a little bit more about who Fannie Willis is… She really demonstrated when she dismissed Kemp’s attorney… Kemp’s attorney was saying this is a political investigation, I’m not gonna show up. She says, not only are you gonna show up, but I was gonna give you a little extra privilege and let you come into the grand jury room, but now you’re gonna sit outside. And she is an expert on the RICO statute, so she is coming in through that organized crime door — tough woman!

Palast Yes, tough woman. She’s very tough. In fact, a lot of African American officials thinks that she’s way too tough, she goes for the handcuffs right away, but no one doubts that she knows exactly what she’s doing as a prosecutor. So, understand, when you’re called before a grand jury, you don’t get the right to a lawyer. If you’re the target, like Giuliani was, you can keep taking the Fifth Amendment, and I imagine that he basically did nothing but take the Fifth Amendment. ‘Cause Rudy blabs too much, he would’ve told us all the wonderful things he said.

Bernstein Well, his attitude changed a little bit on the way in there, ‘cause he knows who he’s going before.

Palast Well, remember, he was a federal prosecutor. He knows he’s facing hard time breaking rocks on a chain gang in Georgia… He saw HUD and those other those other films with Paul Newman, I don’t think he’s looking forward to that, so I’m sure he took the Fifth. But, again, I have to speculate ‘cause it is a secret grand jury proceeding. In addition, like I said, you don’t get a lawyer. But Kemp was claiming executive privilege as governor — that’s kind of like monarchic privilege. I am too important as governor of Georgia to answer questions about a crime in which I’m a witness. And, as Fannie Willis, the prosecutor said to the court, and said to his lawyer, he is merely a witness — what is the problem here? Well, of course, it raises real questions. Because she not only was gonna let his lawyer hold his hand, she was gonna allow him to actually just do a remote hearing, go on a kind of a closed Skype system the court has, give the grand jury 20 minutes, say what happened on the phone calls with Trump and, you know, you’re on you way sir.

In fact, they never made it public. It was Brian Kemp who made it public, that he was being called in. Now, who the heck is going to announce that they’ve been called before a grand jury? But he did. He made it public and then said, oh, she’s doing this politically to harm me. Well, wait, she kept it completely silent. The other thing is, she was gonna let him have a lawyer, just come in by remote. No, no, no, he kept dragging his feet, until now he’s in the middle of his campaign for reelection. He says, she is forcing me to take time out of my campaign when it’s at its “crescendo” — that’s the word that they used, the crescendo of his campaign. Well, this is brand new. I’ve heard of diplomatic immunity, I’ve heard of executive privilege, but I’ve never heard of I’m-on-a-campaign privilege to be a witness in a criminal case. I don’t think you and I could do that, Dennis. Oh, I’m kind of busy, you know, we’ve got the Election Crimes Bulletin tonight, sorry, we can’t show up in court. Yeah, I think that the judge will have to hide his laughter. He’s gonna have to turn around from laughing Kemp out of court.

But the question is why. Why in the world, when the guy had basically a free ride – you can have your lawyer, you can call it in. What’s the problem? And I think the problem is he knows that if he has to talk… I think he also wanted to control… He wanted to know all the questions in advance and control the scope. They said you can’t do that. What are you talking about? That cannot be done. You’re an officer of the court, she told this lawyer, and you keep saying this is political, you’re gonna end up… He’s gonna end up with sanctions, believe me, you don’t play games like this with a grand jury. And what I think is going on here is, and what I want to know as a journalist who’s been hunting down Brian Kemp for 9 years — since he was the renegade Secretary of State of Georgia, really America’s Vote Suppressor in Chief with his really close friend Kris Kobach of Kansas — is what was [said] on those calls with Trump? I suspect that while the big public story that he said, nah, I’m not gonna overturn the election, he was probably spending a lot of time trying to figure out how he could actually in fact overturn the election — that’s one. And the second thing is that he signed a bill right after the election, a month after the January 6th riot, he signed this bill SB 202, which basically sets up to give him the power to do exactly what Trump wants.

I was just talking to Helen Butler. She’s considered Miss Vote in Georgia. She’s head of the late Reverend Lowery’s organization for voting rights [Georgia Coalition for the Peoples’ Agenda]. She was also, because of her expertise in voting, on the Morgan County board of elections. And the first thing Kemp did after that law was passed was remove her. He’s removed 10 members of local boards of elections. I asked her, what’s going on here, for my film, I wanted to get it on camera. Why did Kemp remove you, immediately, as soon as he had the power? She said, because Trump called and said you have to de-certify the election. And the only way to do that in Georgia… Kemp, can’t do it. Kemp has to get local boards of election to not certify, refuse to certify their county’s vote. So, if he can pressure boards of election to de-certify in 2024, he can hand Trump what he wants in 2024. And I think that there may have been some discussion about what they’re gonna do in the future to change the law. I could see Kemp — ‘cause I’ve followed him for a long time — telling Trump, you know, Mr. President, well, I can’t do it now. It’s not in the law, but I’m gonna make it the law. And then, when you run again in 2024, I’ll make you president. I think that if he’s done that, then he’s in real trouble, not only with his reelection.

Bernstein So he’s worried about going from witness to target. You said that Graham was a target. He’s not a target, he’s just a witness.

Palast Excuse me, he’s a witness. But I think that he’s really on the unicycle going down that circus line to become named, and I’ll tell you why. As we mentioned in the last Election Crimes Bulletin, the real crime here is putting together a slate of fake electors and mailing them to National Archives to hand over to Congress, to hand over to the Vice President, Mr. Pence and say these are the electors who were voted by the people of Georgia to represent us at the electoral college. These are people who never were on the ballot. They never ran for electoral college. You can’t just take names out of the phone book who will swear that they’ll vote for you for president and declare that they’ve been made electors by the people of any state — that’s mail fraud. It’s a crime. It’s racketeering, especially under Georgia law, because it’s an easier case to make under Georgia law. Because under Georgia law, you don’t have to have enterprise. This is a little technical about racketeering law. To bring a racketeering case, which I’ve done for the Justice Department, you have to show usually a year’s long operation of an enterprise, like you’re the mob. But in Georgia, you don’t, you can have one instance. So, this one project of trying to jam through fake electors, that itself, that combined operation, if it’s Giuliani and the fake electors, Lindsay Graham and Trump, that’s absolutely a slam-dunk racketeering case under Georgia law — I can tell you that right now.

Bernstein Greg, you’ve been spending a lot of time in Georgia doing this investigation. And, obviously, the landscape for this is the fact that there are key elections in Georgia that could change the history of this country.

Palast Oh, yeah.

Bernstein Could you talk about how this plays as a backdrop to those elections? How does this interweave? What impact will this DA investigation have on those crucial elections?

Palast Well, I think, if Kemp is outed as having tried to fix the elections in Georgia, this is insulting to the people of Georgia. You have to understand that Giuliani came down to Georgia and said that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, their G-Men, are a joke now. Yes, they used to be like almost an arm of the Klan, but they’ve been cleaned up and they’re run by real professionals. And they did an investigation of Cobb County, the absentee ballots and whether [they were tainted]. If you remember, this whole game of “mules”, Black people stuffing the ballot dropboxes. They went through every single ballot, physically, and determined that not one was fraudulent out of tens of thousands. And Giuliani said that was a joke. This is a big problem in Georgia. Georgians are very proud of Georgia — you have to understand that. And they’re not too crazy about some guy with red stuff flowing down his face, this guy from New York, telling Georgians that they are a joke. Okay. So you got Rudy Giuliani telling people that they’re a joke.

This doesn’t help Kemp, you have to understand. So, he has to protect Georgia from what is seen down there by many as an attack on the integrity of Georgia. And don’t forget, when he said that the race in Cobb County was fixed, it was controlled by Republicans. So, Kemp is trying to play both ways against the middle. He still cuddles up to Trump. He says Trump has a problem with me, I don’t have a problem with Trump. After all, Kemp is ultra right wing. He just signed a law, basically, outlawing abortion in Georgia, because of the new Supreme Court ruling. He’s ultra, ultra right. Very close with the evangelicals. So, on one hand, he’s trying to sell himself, Kemp, as Trump’s buddy. On the other hand, he’s trying to take some of those independents who like the fact that he appeared to be standing up to Trump. He wants it both ways. And if the truth comes out, it’s gonna fall one way or the other. If he really did push back against Trump, I think he would’ve already just done that 20 minute quiet appearance before the grand jury. No one would’ve known about it, because if he doesn’t make it public, Fani Willis was not gonna make it public. He could have literally come in and out. So, why this crazy he’s resistance? He’s afraid of what will come out, because it’s amazing what happens, how your stories change when you’re under oath, as opposed to under a TV camera. You can say anything on a TV camera. Under oath, it’s what’s called a perjury trap. If he starts prevaricating, they’ll be reading him his rights. So, I think he knows that nothing he will say is gonna get him any votes and could be a real, real problem if any of it comes out.

Bernstein Wow, this is huge. I am interested… You called it from the beginning. You’ve been saying that this is the prosecution that could make all the trouble. And, obviously, a lot of people are frightened and you’ve got a prosecutor who’s not messing around, who’s got a special grand jury, but other things are happening. [Trump Organization CFO] Alan Weisberg was convicted on 15 felonies. They gave him five months, but he’s gotta say something or he’ll die on Rikers Island. And believe me, I can testify, having taught there five years, that ain’t no place to die. I can’t imagine him surviving a couple of weeks there anyway. Do you still think that this prosecution is gonna lead.

Palast Yes, well, Georgia’s central. I keep going back to Georgia. Here I am in Los Angeles, every year for nine years I end up in Georgia, ‘cause it’s always the center of the schemes to bend elections. Brian Kemp is no hero. Somehow, he got played as a hero just ‘cause he got in a fight with Donald Trump. We’re so crazy about Trump that we make heroes of anyone who gets in a fight with him. But, remember, he’s fighting him from the right. So, be very careful about that. In addition, if Stacey Abrams gets elected governor, this will be the first Black woman in American history ever elected governor in Georgia — deep, redneck Georgia. In addition, you have Reverend Raphael Warnock running for reelection — he was elected in the special election a year and a half ago, but to finish out a short term — and that’s a very close race. I know that that the liberal coastal press says, oh, he can’t lose to Herschel Walker, because there’s all these ads that Herschel Walker put a gun to his ex-wife’s head, all that type of stuff. Well, there’s a lot of gun owners in Georgia who have done the same thing. I’m not sure that’s gonna harm him. It’s not harming him in the polls. I mean, the fact that he was a wife beater doesn’t overcome the fact that he was a football hero. And this is Georgia, okay. He’s not a cricket star, he is a football hero. That’s a very big thing. Whereas Reverend Warnock is merely a minister, a man of God, not a man of football, so it’s gonna be a tight race.

And if Kemp is in trouble, if he gets indicted or he runs into other problems with the courts here, basically those races are up for grabs. So, they’re central in terms of the races, but, again, Fani Willis also has the advantage that she can tell a grand jury, make a decision on whether Trump or any of these other characters, Giuliani, et cetera, should be indicted. All she needs, ultimately, is to get a final approval from a judge. She does not have to ask the Justice Department, there’s no politicians. You just saw all the hell that broke loose because Merrick Garland personally approved the raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property. In the Justice Department, you can’t bring a racketeering case without the personal approval of the Attorney General, which makes it political. They even have policy papers that indictments should be timed to avoid any influence on elections. No such restrictions in Georgia. If Fani Willis has the evidence, she’s got the indictments, and she’s clearly circling in on Agent Orange.

Bernstein Right. And she’s not gonna be distracted. You’re listening to the Election Crimes Bulletin on Flashpoints on Pacifica Radio. Greg Palast is our co-host for this weekly presentation. He is the fighter for your vote. He’s working on a new film, Vigilantes: Georgia’s Vote Suppression Hitman.

Palast The “vigilante” refers to Brian Kemp and his new law, which allows vigilante voter challenges. Anyone can challenge anyone. And so far 88 Republicans have challenged over a quarter million voters. By the way, not one Democrat has challenged one voter.

Bernstein Well, let me come back to that grand jury, because the other thing about it, we were talking about the fact that the DA is an expert in dealing with in RICO statutes and stuff like that.

Palast Yes.

Bernstein And it does seem like she’s going RICO, because the amount of people that she’s interested in, that she’s planning to subpoena, doesn’t that give us an indication that she’s going big?

Palast Oh, absolutely. I think that she’s going where the evidence is. You know, you can’t be submitting fake electors and not expect the cops to show up at your door. You can’t say the crime is too big to investigate. And she’s doing the right thing by doing a very systematic, careful grand jury review, witness by witness. Including, by the way, we haven’t mentioned the lesser known character, but very important on the right wing, Cleta Mitchell, who is an attorney who specializes in figuring out vote suppression schemes. She was actually on the call with Donald Trump to the state. And I wanna know if she was on the call with Brian Kemp. Because Brian Kemp’s vote suppression tactics looked like they were written by Cleta Mitchell and her organization, the Bradley Foundation, and True the Vote, these ultra right wing, basically anti-voter organizations. So, I don’t think we can get away from the issue of vote suppression and the attempt to overturn the election in Georgia. And I would like to see, I was hoping at some point that Fani Willis will open up the investigation even wider into the vote suppression tactics in general.

Catch the Election Crimes Bulletin each week on KPFA’s FlashPoints News or via our PodCast.

In this week’s edition of the Election Crimes Bulletin, host Dennis Bernstein and investigative reporter Greg Palast discuss the recent FBI raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. Separate from the investigation being undertaken by the January 6th Committee, the raid on Trump’s Florida home was done at the request of the National Archives, who were seeking official documents Trump had illegally removed from the White House. And there’s a certain amount of schadenfreude to be had, knowing Trump’s home was raided, in part, because of a law he signed to ensnare Hillary Clinton — and to prevent her from running for office. But though this National Archives-instigated raid puts the former president in significant legal jeopardy, it’s a case out of Georgia that might be more likely to deprive Trump of his liberty — and his infamous comb-over!

TRANSCRIPT Dennis Bernstein: I just wanna start off with a couple of quick headlines here. Here’s one about the Attorney General. He had a press conference with no conference part. Attorney General Merrick Garland said Thursday that the Justice Department had filed the motion to unseal a search warrant and property receipt from the FBI’s recent search of former president Donald Trump’s MAGA-Largo estate.

It looks like the folks who helped to take care of him are trying to take care of him in a different way. But let me just add this into the mix, and then I want you to comment. This is coming out of Ohio, the armed man [Ricky Walter Shiffer] who tried to storm the FBI’s Cincinnati office on Thursday, before getting into a shootout with cops that left him dead in an Ohio cornfield, appeared to be a conspiracy-addled Trump-superfan, who told his followers on Truth Social that he was ready for combat after the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago. He, by the way, was also guess where on in January? Yeah, at the insurrection.

Greg, we’ve talked about the situation growing more and more violent, and we’re seeing that happen — attacking the FBI, that’s pretty amazing.

Greg Palast: Well, in fact, yes, actually the amount of violence, having just come back from Georgia, it ain’t pretend. There were guys in a film that I’m working on right now…there was a so-called reenactment by the Civil War aficionados of the one single battle that the rebel won outside of Atlanta, they redid that battle. But it was interesting talking to the spectators and re-enactors. I said, why are you here? They said, to support the Confederate history. I said, well, isn’t that war over? And he said, nope, the Confederacy’s not over and the South will rise again. And then they started talking about how they’d already picked out the high points at the peach tree hotels in downtown Atlanta, waiting for that moment. Remember Trump’s statement to the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”. Well, they’re still standing back and they’re still standing by — and they are armed to the teeth. And this ain’t no joke.

So, yes, obviously the armed reaction to the FBI raid [is worrying], but, let’s get into that FBI raid, ‘cause most of the media has just simply covered it as, well, you know, the FBI, how dare they break into… Even Pence was saying, how dare they break it to a former president’s residence? This is unprecedented. Well, you know, a lot of things about Trump are unprecedented.

If you take government property that isn’t yours, and he took many boxes…they aren’t his, they belong to you and me. They are the public’s documents. In fact, it was a guy named Donald Trump who signed a law when he was president saying that it is a crime for a president, or anyone who would control presidential papers, to illegally remove those papers. And that was because, if you remember, they were all berserko about Hillary Clinton’s emails. And so, Trump himself, he’s being raided based on the law that he himself signed and pushed that said, if you grab presidential documents, if you grab official documents and bury them or eliminate them, you go to prison. And by the way, that law has one other piece of punishment that Trump came up with, which is that if you get caught removing presidential papers illegally, you can’t run for federal public office. So, this is real, real serious for Mr. Trump. And this, again, is the law he crafted to try to hopefully ensnare and imprison Hillary Clinton, or get her barred from running for office again. But now it may be that he’s the man who’s gonna get literally hoisted on his own petard — legally.

By the way, this presidential records issue goes back to Richard Nixon, who was very good at creating false papers, as we know. So, before we get too excited about the wonderful FBI, they are at the center of the fake creation of documents, the COINTELPRO program, misused by Nixon, and that led to the 1978 Presidential Records Act. So, what we’re talking about is a series of laws based on abuses.

And, by the way, I do think that Hillary Clinton did abuse the law. Come on, she didn’t know that public papers are public and not private? Also, when they said that this has never happened before, in fact, Hillary Clinton’s servers were seized, ultimately by the FBI. They did check in her home in Chappaqua, which is also the home of former president Bill Clinton. So, no, this is not unprecedented. But, again, in that case, they were technically looking, not for the presidential papers, but for a potential future president and the Secretary of State. But this is not that unusual, except that Trump is unusual.

By the way, this is nothing to do with the January 6th hearings. This is a very separate federal grand jury that was impaneled at the request of the National Archives, which said papers are missing. You could tell that, ’cause I know when I work with these federal agencies, these things are numbered and stamped. And also, when I do investigations, you have a letter responding to a letter, but you didn’t see the original letter? It’s very hard to run off with the documents and bury them.

There’s real questions. because these were documents which included national security material, which would not have anything to do with the January 6th hearings. My curiosity has to do with…you know, why would Trump grab the stuff? The answer might be, and again, I’m always afraid to speculate, but I have done these investigations…Remember, Trump was impeached over threatening Ukraine with disarming Ukraine. Imagine if he’d gotten away with that today. Can you imagine? Trump tried to disarm Ukraine… and it’s quite consequential. So, that might be in that information, because, why would he be taking national security documents and hiding them away?

And, and let me add a few other things… We know from an informer who got to Newsweek that it was someone very close to Trump. One of the people close to Trump, running Mar-a-Lago, who happened to know where all these papers were hidden. And what caused the raid was that the FBI had actually a very positive relationship with Trump. They had asked his lawyers, they said, listen, we understand from the National Archives that you have boxes of presidential documents. You can’t have those. But, before we determine whether they are public or private documents, just lock them up.

They actually went to Mar-a-Lago in June, so this is not new. They went to Mar-a-Lago in June, but it was very friendly and they just said, listen, just lock those things away and have heavier locks than you have right now. We need to keep those secure. But it was only when they got an informer to say they jacked the FBI, they told you about the 15 boxes in that room, but there are other boxes in two other rooms — in his bedroom and in another room.

When you lie to the FBI, that creates a bit of a problem. And that’s when they decided that they couldn’t tip him off, ’cause obviously the sentiment was that he was telling them there’s only 15 boxes, when, in fact, he had a lot more that he was hiding — and why. So, that’s why they had to do the raid. Though, I will say, unusually for the FBI, they did not wear any FBI identification and they carried no weapons. Wouldn’t you like to have that kind of nice kid glove treatment, Dennis?

Bernstein: Yes, well…I’m gonna guess that people of color that make up the FBI is probably about less than 1%. The FBI has a reputation for being a racist organization. I’m sorry, I’m not gonna feel bad about them either. And everybody knows that if it was Black and brown people who were carrying forth with an insurrection, there would’ve been blood everywhere and it would’ve been the blood of Black and brown people. So we know that there’s another story here, and it has to do with the inability of the white FBI to deal with terrorism at the roots, which they’ve known for decades…that it’s white.

Palast: Well, what’s interesting here is that the FBI seemed to have been dragged into this. It’s not like the FBI were aggressively trying to go after Trump. In fact, it was the National Archives, which you just think of as kind of like a fancy library. It was the National Archives which is very upset. It’s their job to keep control of those papers. You can’t just take off with papers. They are not yours. It’s a government of, by and for the people. It’s not of, by, and for Donald Trump or the Trump Organization. And that’s very, very important. These are our documents. He stole them from us. It is a form of theft. And it is very dangerous stuff, because we also need to know what our government is doing. That’s why the law was passed originally in 1978, because Richard Nixon, Tricky Dick, was very good at either creating documents or burying them.

So, again, this was not the FBI. You can almost see when you watched our Attorney General, Merick Garland, at his press conference today. He almost seemed like…I wish I weren’t here. But, again, it’s not the FBI, it was the National Archives. They required justice to impanel a grand jury, and the grand jury made the decision, and a Florida judge granted the warrant for the raid. So, it’s not really even about the FBI getting tough, or taking on Trump, or any of that. It’s, literally, that they were forced to make this move by the courts and the National Archives. So, bless the National Archives. You never usually think of them as the tough guys on the street.

Bernstein: Everybody knows, still at this point in terms of Trump, it’s what’s happening in Georgia, it’s what’s happening through the DA which is most precise in terms of the ability to go after Trump. Is that case proceeding a pace?

Palast: Well, interestingly, I think this National Archives problem is a big one for Trump.

Bernstein: Oh, that’s a big one for Trump too. Absolutely.

Palast: Because he signed the law saying that if you are found guilty, you can’t run for federal office. And so this could actually be the killer one for him. But, in terms of actually serving on a chain gang, that’s gonna be the Georgia District Attorney.

Bernstein: The Georgia chain gang.

Palast: It’d be like Paul Newman in Hudor whatever film that was, right?

Bernstein: Give that guy a sledgehammer. Make him break rocks.

Palast: What I want to know is will he be allowed to wear his red tie? And he won’t be allowed the comb-over either.

Bernstein: Will he be allowed McDonald’s in federal prison? McDonald’s big burger? I know you can get those at Rikers Island.

Palast: I do know that guys like Trump, if they ever do serve, they serve in places with tennis courts. I’ve seen them.

Bernstein: Exactly.

Palast: Like there’s a so-called prison in La Jolla that I would love. I’d be willing to pay a fair amount of money to spend a weekend there. It has tennis courts, views the ocean. This is for the white collar criminals, basically, to take a break. I know one who actually, literally, signed in for the weekend.

Bernstein: [laughs] Can we have a 60 second version of what’s happening in Atlanta?

Palast: Okay. The key thing is that you have a tough District Attorney who is slowly building a case and it looks like it could take down, if not Trump, a lot of people around him. Like Cleta Mitchell, who is one of the key people behind groups like True the Vote. You can’t remove this from the vote suppression activity. So, she’s involved in convincing Trump, and others were involved in convincing Trump, to have an alternative slate of electors for the presidential vote — and that ain’t in the Constitution. We have had Constitutional crises, there are fights over elector slates, but he literally just pulled a bunch of names of his cronies and said that they were voted in by the people of Georgia. Well, I’m sorry, their names weren’t even on the ballot. And that involves, when you do transmit that, interestingly, again, it’s once again to the National Archives. When you transmit your list of electors to the National Archives, and it’s a false list, it’s made up of people who’ve never even been on a ballot, that’s wire fraud. That’s a federal crime. You do two, three federal crimes like that… And they’re also state crimes, because under Georgia’s racketeering law, which is tougher than the federal law. That is, when I say tougher, it’s easier to prove your case. And I’ve done racketeering cases for the Justice Department as chief investigator, and… I don’t know how Trump’s gonna wiggle out of indictment in Georgia at this moment. You know, I’m not saying I’m for or against it, I’m just gonna say that if there’s one danger here of his indictment, that’s it. But the National Archives thing is now serious and it’s in the hands of a grand jury. So, Trump has now, really, a very serious…he’s got a problem by the law he signed.

Bernstein: And I think he was outmaneuvered by the Attorney General here. This was a beautiful way to go at Trump. You know, he didn’t make it public, it was up to Trump. But, since Trump made a big deal of it, they went public.

Palast: They made a big deal that they wanted to do the raid when Trump was not there. They knew he was at his golf course in Bedminster in Jersey. That’s why they did the raid at the time that they did it. Because in June, when they did show up and it was friendly, they were let in…Trump even came in and shook hands with the FBI agents and said whatever we can do for you, whatever we can get for you, just ask. And I hate to say it, that bit of friendliness is defrauding the FBI. You’re misleading the FBI by saying, look, we’re being open, we’re giving you everything, here I am in the room, what questions do you have? The question will be whether Donald Trump knew that he had some extra goodies in his bedroom…. besides eating cookies in bed?

Bernstein: [laughs]

Palast: I do have to add…it was Hillary Clinton’s logs for the Rose Law Firm which could have put her in prison, which were in fact kept, those time logs were kept under her bed at the White House. So, we’ve been here before.

Bernstein: Stranger things have happened — maybe?!?

In this week's edition of the Election Crimes Bulletin, we reveal how the contents of Alex Jones' cellphone — which were accidentally handed over to the prosecution in their entirety by the shock jock's own lawyers during the Sandy Hook defamation trial, and will now likely end up in the hands of the January 6 Committee — could provide proof that Trump and members of his administration were directly involved in the planning of the illegal march to Capitol which ended in violence.

"If I were in the Trump crew — Mark Meadows, Chief of Staff, etc. — I would probably be having to change my underpants right now."

Dennis J. Bernstein: Today seems to be Alex Jones day… Given the fact that his attorneys, apparently, made a mistake… I don't know what happened there with all those emails ending up on the wrong side of the bench, but it doesn't seem to be helping Mr. Jones. Your thoughts on where we are now and where it's going.

Greg Palast: A couple things… Number one, we're talking about the trial of Alex Jones, which he's already defaulted on. He's lost a liable suit, because he basically gave out the addresses of parents of children who were murdered in the killings in Connecticut. He said that it never happened, it was crisis actors, and these people are all fake.

So, imagine you lose a six year old kid, a seven year old, your child, and then you find you're up on television with your picture saying you're a fake, you're a liar, you're just out to take away Second Amendment rights — and here's your home address! People had to move, going into hiding after losing their children. So, Jones, oddly, instead of being charged, which he should have been criminally with threatening people's lives, ‘cause their lives are in danger, he just simply lost a civil action for liable…

But now, one of his lawyers accidentally, apparently, I mean, I'm sure they asked for it, accidentally sent over his entire cell phone contents. That means years of emails, that means all his text messages. Now, if I were in the Trump crew — Mark Meadows, Chief of Staff, etc. — I would probably be having to change my underpants right now…

Mark, I do know, from speaking to insiders at Women for America First, that they were sending panic messages to Alex Jones, and to his partner, Ali Alexander. That's the guy who said, “We'll light this whole sh*t on fire.” Remember, he is threatening to burn down the State House and the State Capitol in Georgia days before he goes to Washington and leads the march to the Capitol to burn that down. So, he said, we're gonna burn this down. This is not like, oh my God, this crowd is out of control. That was the plan. That was announced. We have it on camera.

And by the way, thank you to Zach D Roberts for getting that film and basically taking his life in his hands to get that Ali Alexander threat. And that guy that was screaming his head off before Ali, that was Alex Jones saying, you know, this is the globalist plan to take over America, blah blah.

But we do know that Ali Alexander and Alex Jones were sent several panicked texts saying do not announce a march at the January 6th rally. They sent messages to Mark Meadows saying don't do the march.

Now, Ali Alexander and Alex Jones both claimed that the White House called them, contacted them, and then had people show up and say, you stand at the corner of this parking lot, Trump’s gonna call for a march and you lead the march. So they knew in advance that Trump was gonna call for the march — even though he was told it was illegal and dangerous. Illegal and dangerous, he was warned, but he said it anyway.

So, what I'm very interested in is how many texts went back and forth from the White House, and Mark Meadows in particular, to Ali Alexander and Alex Jones, and probably the texting between Jones and Alexander and their planning for the illegal march. You know, find the messages saying we know this march is illegal.

So, it's not just that Alex Jones is in deep trouble, it’s that Mark Meadows. Donald Trump, and whoever else from the White House that was involved in actually planning a march they knew was illegal and dangerous. This is real bad news for Donald Trump.

Learn more at GregPalast.com

About a month ago, I would’ve said there’s no chance Donald Trump will be indicted, and I still think that you’re not gonna see that on a federal level. But Trump may yet see the inside of a prison cell, thanks to the efforts of Fani Willis, the first woman to hold the office of District Attorney in Fulton County, Georgia.

Because of the Georgia Republicans’ zeal to put Democrats like Stacey Abrams behind bars — Democrats who are guilty of registering hundreds of thousands of voters in Georgia — the state created its own racketeering laws, which make it a lot easier to prosecute people than under the federal RICO statute. Specifically, Georgia made interference in the election process count as a “predicate act”, which is a prerequisite for RICO prosecutions.

Ironically, this now leaves Trump open to a racketeering prosecution in Georgia, and a grand jury has been impaneled in Atlanta, which is looking into whether the former president and his cronies interfered with and tried to overturn the legal vote count in Georgia. Beyond the attempt to use a slate of phony electors to overturn Joe Biden’s win, the grand jury may also be investigating Trump’s role in instigating and organizing the violence that took place not only at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., but also before the January 6th insurrection at the Georgia State Capitol and Governor’s Mansion.

In the latest Election Crimes Bulletin, first broadcast on Pacifica Radio’s FlashPoints News on July 28, 2022, host Dennis Bernstein and I discuss the political and technical reasons why it’ll be easier to indict Trump for a racketeering crime in Georgia.

To learn more, and for a transcript of this program, visit: https://www.gregpalast.com/why-georgia-da-fani-willis-is-the-biggest-threat-to-donald-trump/

Nullification, as Martin Luther king called it, is a continuing theme in the fight against the right to vote. And it wasn't just the January 6, 2021 insurrection. In 1877 you had a successful overturning, a nullification of the vote, so it can happen again.

In Dinesh D’Souza’s new film #2000Mules — which claims to prove the 2020 election was stolen by an army of mules that stuffed ballot drop-boxes with fraudulent votes — they don’t show the face or give us the name of a single perp. Why not? They even blur the face of a dog that went to a drop-box with one of these so-called mules! Nice of D’Souza to protect the guilty. Unless, of course, they weren’t guilty. Or just guilty of Voting While Black.

2000Mules: Fact or Fiction? Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/2000-mules-belly-laughs-belly-aches-from-dsouzas-proof-that-trump-won/

In his film 2000 Mules, Dinesh D’Souza sets out to prove a giant criminal conspiracy to stuff ballot boxes with fraudulent votes. The proof? Well, you can see it with your own eyes: There’s a BLACK man and he is dropping off BALLOTS in a ballot drop box. Case closed! You can laugh now. But crying time is coming. I predict that 2000 Mules will create the platform for Trump’s loss of the election in 2024 — and Trump’s inauguration in 2025.

D’Souza’s charge is mind-blowing... In Fulton County (Atlanta), he tells us 92,670 ballots were stuffed illegally into drop boxes. That’s astonishing — because there were only 79,000 ballots cast in drop boxes in Fulton County! And in Detroit, it was worse. “Mules” stuffed 226,590 ballots into Detroit area drop boxes — way more than the total number of all mail-in ballots — about three times the number of ballots in drop boxes.

In this interview, Palast chats with Zach D. Roberts, and breaks down the flawed math and misleading claims featured in 2000 Mules.

Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/2000-mules-belly-laughs-belly-aches-from-dsouzas-proof-that-trump-won/

“I don't want anyone censored, whether you're supporting Democrats, Republicans, or whatever. And I don't support any freaking candidate, because they all end up going rotten, I don't care who they are.” — Greg Palast

“It's a victim's parade, send in the clowns, theater of the mass, whitelist for everybody.” — Jack Blood

In this week's episode of The FlashPoints' Election Crimes Bulletin, John C. Bonifaz of Free Speech for People talks to hosts Greg Palast and Dennis J. Bernstein about his group’s lawsuit, which challenges Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s candidacy for re-election under the 14th Amendment’s Insurrectionist Disqualification Clause

More than 50 activists convened on a power plant in West Virginia last weekend, calling for its closure. By the end of the day, 16 people were arrested. The plant the protesters targeted in Grant Town is one where Sen. Joe Manchin makes nearly $500,000 per year selling a dirty coal waste called “gob.” Gob is short for “garbage of bituminous,” which Sen. Manchin sells to the power plant for a tidy profit via Enersystems, the company he founded and that his son now runs.

The protesters, a mix of local and national activists, call themselves West Virginia Rising. One of them was Michael Whitten, a retired miner from Boone County, West Virginia. “When I worked on strip mines, we threw that [gob] away,” Whitten told DeSmogBlog. “We covered it up, it’s like if you had a wood-burning stove at your home and you wanted to put wet wood in it — it’s just not economical.”

He’s right. The West Virginia customers served by the Grant Town Power Plant, run by American Bituminous Power Partners (AMBit), are being charged more because of the gob. In the last six years burning this waste coal has cost the local power utility an additional $117 million. All of this — even though regulators initially fought the plant’s transition to burning gob — was pushed through thanks to Sen. Manchin.

Manchin, who has a blind trust set up for his investments, has continually been a one-man blockade for climate legislation. That came to a head this year when he essentially killed the Build Back Better bill, Biden’s signature climate and social policy legislation, by dropping his (some might argue never serious) support of it.

Full report by Zach D. Roberts: https://www.gregpalast.com/west-virginia-protest-calls-out-manchins-coal-profits/

JoeManchin #GrantTown #WestVirginia #WVRising #CoalBaronBlockade #StopGOB #WestVirginiaRising #Pollution #Environment

Russia got 45% of its national budget — that’s all its social programs, everything — from oil and gas royalties, and the price of gas hit the floor during COVID. Russia was broke. Russia was bankrupt before Putin’s war in the Ukraine. Thanks to this invasion, the price of oil has completely reversed the bankruptcy of the Russian state, and now they're making money off this war. So, we have to cutoff Putin’s ability to make money off the oil.

Venezuela has the largest reserves of oil on the planet. If you look at OPEC, they put Saudi Arabia as number two. Venezuela's producing very little oil, not even enough for its own needs at this moment, when it was producing 3.2 million barrels of oil a day — 2 million barrels a day for export. If we unleash oil from Venezuela, then Putin's profit from the invasion evaporates.

Putin is earning roughly, by my calculation, a billion dollars a day windfall from the sales of oil and gas, at prices which today hit about $118 a barrel, with natural gas going up an equal amount. So, Venezuela is the way to stop Putin's tanks, it's that simple. Chevron say that within three months they could bring 800,000 barrels of oil a day to the US from Venezuela, all they need is Biden to lift the Trump embargo. That 800,000 barrels a day, by the way, equals the maximum amount of oil that the US gets from Russia.

This deadly embargo of Venezuela was imposed by Donald Trump. Why is Biden continuing with Trump's policies, which right now are enriching Putin, by keeping 2 million barrels of oil a day off the market? Keep in mind, Venezuela has invaded no one, attacked no one, and they’ve got a president that was elected, even if our State Department isn’t exactly a fan of Nicolás Maduro.

And while Biden is celebrating the fact he got Europe to cancel the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which wasn’t in operation anyway, they’re still taking 1.9 trillion cubic feet of gas a year from Nord Stream 1. That 1.9 trillion cubic feet a year, which Russia provides through Nord Stream 1, can be replaced 100% by Venezuela, which according to the US Energy Information Administration is capable of over 2 trillion cubic feet of gas production a year for export. They could send this as liquid natural gas to Europe, and completely replace what they get from Nord Stream 1. But we're not doing it, and here's why… It’s being blocked by an axis of awful, which includes two powerful Democrats.

One is Bob Menendez, the Senator from New Jersey who's the only sitting senator who's ever had unanimous censure by the Senate Ethics Committee for corruption. And the other is Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was deeply involved in an illegal scheme to move Democratic National Committee money to the Hillary Clinton campaign. Meanwhile Charles Koch is refusing to shutter his operations in Russia, and is using his power and influence to stop any oil flowing out of Venezuela. And, by the way, the Kochs also funded the Clinton administration, which helped put Putin in power. Here’s the thing; when you corrode and corrupt democracy, it has consequences.

As long as the tanks roll, Koch Industries will be rolling in it — in this edition of the FlashPoints, Election Crimes Bulletin, Greg Palast explains why.

Journalist Larisa Alexandrovna gives us a report on the war on democracy currently being waged in Ukraine and Russia, and Major Gamaliel Turner Sr., a victim of Georgia’s new vigilante voter law, tells us about the legal battle to make his vote count in the United States.

Greg Palast hosts this week's Reality Check on KPFK. His guests are filmmaker, playwright and activist Josh Fox (Gasland), and journalist and author Ben Judah (Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin).

The mayhem in Ukraine is a profit center for Putin. 43% of the federal Russian budget was provided by oil and gas revenues and royalties. Russia lives and dies, literally, on its oil revenues, and this mayhem has caused the price of oil to rise to over $100 a barrel, so he has a war-windfall of a half billion dollars a day. So the question is, what can we do to bring down the price of oil? Putin's a powerful man at a hundred bucks a barrel, but he's pretty weak at thirty bucks. So how do we do this? Well, we’ve been embargoing the nation with the largest supply of oil on the planet — Venezuela.

Watch the full 30-minute TMI interview with Aldous Tyler: https://youtu.be/aVTl-t1cRqU

Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/venezuela-can-bring-putin-to-his-knees/

Putin claims he is attacking to eliminate Ukraine’s “Nazi“ government… headed by a Jewish president! Screw sanctions, Putin only cares about the price of oil. If Biden would end the insane embargo of Venezuela, oil prices would collapse and so would Putin‘s killing spree.

Whatever peace there is in Ukraine is the result of the Minsk agreements of 2015 signed by Ukraine, Ukrainian Separatists, France and Germany and endorsed by Russia. The Minsk accords gave the eastern region protection from attack and some measure of autonomy — but not independence. On the basis of the agreement, Russia moved out of the Donbas.

However, the Ukrainian government has never implemented the agreements under which Russian troops left the border area. From Putin’s view, by breaching these agreements, the Ukrainian Parliament (notably, over the objection of President Zelenski) is clearly daring Russia to go back into the Donbas.

On the other hand, the Ukrainian separatists have never implemented the Minsk accords either. Even now, the separatists are holding Ukrainian hostages.

So, the problem is every side gives lip service to the Minsk agreements, but it’s all lip, no service.

Learn more, read "7 Facts about Ukraine" at: https://www.gregpalast.com/7-facts-about-ukraine/

Once again, it's down to Georgia in the November 2022 midterm elections. Senator Reverend Warnock is running for reelection, and Stacey Abrams is running for governor against the incumbent Brian Kemp. It's not a question of who's going to win. The GOP’s decided it can't win, so it's figuring out how to not let the voters vote.

And here's a whole new game that, hopefully, doesn't spread from Georgia. They are changing state law to allow the removal of election board officials. So, for example, Spalding County in rural Georgia had three black members plus a black election supervisor — all three black members were removed as well as the supervisor. They were replaced, and the GOP now has absolute control of that board.

And it's not benign. The first thing they did was to vote to eliminate Sunday early voting, which is the traditional black voting day in many states, Souls to the Polls day, you go after church. A lot of it is because low-income people and older people don't have cars, so they go in those church vans.

In addition, in Monroe County, they removed the two black Democrats from the board. One is Helen Butler, and I hate to say it, but it's probably my fault that she was removed from election board in Monroe County. She was my co-plaintiff in the successful federal lawsuit against Brian Kemp and his successor as Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, where we required them to open up their files of names of the Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters that they were flushing off the voter rolls. We won that lawsuit, and the retaliation is to remove Helen Butler from the Monroe County elections board.

And these boards are really important. First of all, they determine whether voters are purged from the voter rolls. We've talked constantly about voter trickery — Crosscheck, ERIC, Use It or Lose It, all these games — all these various ways of flushing people off the voter rolls. It's not minor. We're talking about the removal of over half a million voters from the voter rolls in Georgia.

With these purges, the purge lists go down to the counties, and the counties supposedly have to do their own investigation before they simply write people off the voter rolls. But I can tell you right now, Helen Butler says, if she isn't there, no one will check anything, they’ll just take these GOP hit lists and remove voters from the voter rolls.

Here's a little-known story that people don't know about what happened in Georgia. Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger’s no hero. He thought that he had disqualified enough votes to give Trump the win, because they disqualified so many. But what they didn't expect was groups like Rainbow PUSH, Black Voters Matter Fund, and the Transformative Justice Coalition, who manned phone banks.

When a ballot is disqualified in Georgia, you have the right as a voter to go in and “cure” it — fix it. So if you used a red pen, you refill out the ballot in black. If you signed your signature in a different way than when you registered or on your driver's license, you can re-sign it. And these groups literally got tens of thousands of people to go into County Clerk's offices and fix their ballots — which Raffensperger has told me he wasn’t expecting. He was dead shocked.

It wasn't the Democratic party that did this. The Democratic party sat on its hands. But the activists went out and got thousands and thousands of voters to go back to the County Clerk’s office and fix their ballots. And that's what put Biden over the top, and ultimately put Ossoff and Warnock in the Senate, because of this tremendous grassroots effort.

Raffensperger thought that he had beaten them, but he wasn’t going to go to jail for Trump. That's where Raffensperger drew the line. That doesn't make him a hero. It makes him a co-conspirator who got cold feet and jumped out of the getaway car.

➡️ @RickSmithShow 📺 youtu.be/r9hpzgK5QKU 🔊 linktr.ee/RickSmithShow

The January 6th committee has subpoenaed 14 GOP operatives from seven states to ask them who is behind their very strange, and very dangerous attempt to overturn the election, by providing seven sets of phony electors.

What are electors? Those are the people who actually vote for president of the United States. Look high and low in the Constitution and you will not find the right to vote in our Constitution. Rather, the president is picked by the electors and the electoral college. But there's also an alternative way of picking presidents, which is using the 12th Amendment. Let me explain…

What happened was, on January 6th, Vice-President Mike Pence received seven slates of electors, but not the electors who were voted by the people of the states. These fake slates of electors were from Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It was not the electors for Joe Biden, who had won those states, rather it was a bunch of GOP operatives, who fraudulently claimed their states had voted for Trump. These alternative electors had their own little private electoral college meetings and they elected Donald Trump for their states, which would make him president of the United States.

You might think, this is nuts, you can't just get a bunch of people together in a room and say, I think we'll have Trump again. It's not a joke, because under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, it's what happens when there are not enough electors to become president. You have to win 270 electoral college votes. So what these characters have done is they provided alternative lists of electors. If those electors were accepted over the ones that were submitted by the states themselves, Trump would have been reelected.

Now, Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the January 6th Committee wants to know who was behind this scheme, because it's a fraud upon the government. This looks like a crime. Chairman Thompson. I'm going to give you a hint: Donald Trump. This went straight to the Oval Office.

Now that a special grand jury is being impaneled at the request of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to investigate interference in the 2020 election, I don’t think it’s just Donald Trump that’s in trouble. There were 29 phone calls between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — twenty-nine — not just one. The Republicans are claiming it's a political hit job. However, there was a panel of 20 Atlanta Superior Court judges — every one of them Republican appointees — who approved Willis' request. The special grand jury, which has subpoena power, will commence on May 2, 2022, and will have 12 months to conduct an investigation into "potential disruptions to the lawful administration of the 2020 elections."

I don’t think it’s just Donald Trump that’s in trouble now that a special grand jury is being impaneled at the request of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to investigate interference in the 2020 election. The Republicans, including Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, were playing fast and loose with accusations of voter fraud. I wouldn’t be surprised if Raffensperger gets cuffed. And, if there is justice, he should be breaking rocks in a chain gang.

There were 29 phone calls between Trump and Raffensperger — twenty-nine — not one. Raffensperger released one, where he looks like a man for all seasons. I’d like to get the recordings of those other calls. And I’m sure the grand jury will want to hear them too. I don’t know how many were recorded, but I want to know what’s in those other calls, and to what extent Raffensperger and his office were playing games with Trump.

“Look, all I want to do is this; I just want to find 11,780 votes.” — Donald Trump speaking to Brad Raffensperger in a call recorded on January 2, 2021

Understand, the guy that Trump is speaking to, Brad Raffensperger, there’s probably no one in the country who is more vicious when it comes to false, crazy, wild, and unsupported accusations of voter fraud by Democrats than Brad Raffensperger… He really is the Purge’n General of Georgia. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is no hero.

This is the guy that wrongly removed 198,000 legitimate voters from the voter rolls of Georgia. We have their names and addresses. I did the investigation, the ACLU put out my report, Black Voters Matter went to federal court to get the people put back on before the election. And if you watched Democracy Now!, you’d know that I was, literally, physically chasing Brad Raffensperger all over the Capitol to get him to go over that list, as a federal court ordered him to.

When you talk about Jim Crow tactics, this guy is the best in the nation — and I don’t mean that as a compliment, I mean it as a warning. I think Trump was shocked that he didn’t get the cooperation from Raffensperger. And he didn’t get it for a simple reason; Raffensperger mucked with the numbers as much as he could before the election, but when the count came through, he wasn’t going to serve five to life for Donald Trump.

In the days between the November 3rd, 2020 presidential election and January 6th, 2021, the day Congress was scheduled to certify Joe Biden as winner and next occupant of the White House, Donald Trump and his inner circle were working to subvert the will of the American people. The plot that proceeded the pro-Trump violent insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6th, involved conservative lawyer and Trump advisor, John Eastman, who argued that the Constitution’s 12th Amendment gave then Vice President, Mike Pence, the discretion to decide which states’ electoral votes should be counted if there was a dispute — because GOP legislators had already been primed to make baseless allegations that widespread voter fraud had tainted the election.

The plot would have several key states submit competing slates of electors, thereby throwing the election result into dispute. The 12th Amendment dictates that if no candidate achieves the necessary majority, the matter goes to the House of Representatives to be decided, where each state is given one vote. On January 6th, 2021, the Republicans controlled 26 state delegations, just enough to overturn the will of the people and award the election victory to Trump.

In this edition of Between the Lines, we speak with bestselling author and investigative journalist, Greg Palast, who has been reporting on voter suppression issues for 22 years. In his recent article titled “What do you call a failed insurrection? Practice” he explains how the same elements in the unsuccessful plot to steal the election in 2020 will likely be executed again by Trump and the GOP in the 2024 election. Palast warns that, unless we can preserve democracy in this year’s 2022 midterm election, Trump and the Republicans could very well succeed.

Transcript: https://www.gregpalast.com/how-trump-and-the-gop-could-steal-the-election-in-2024/

Our action partner, Black Voters Matter, boycotted Biden’s speech in Georgia on the voting rights bills, refusing to act as a photo op prop. Understand the frustration: we’ve been screaming about Georgia as Jim Crow central for 8 years. Laws alone won’t help: we need the Justice Department to stomp on the new "voter fraud vigilante" challenge system we uncovered. We need enforcement of the laws we have, Joe.

Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/georgias-original-sin-and-the-2022-secret-vote-crushing-scheme/

Drive Time host Dave Glover and investigative journalist Greg Palast discusses the tyranny of the extraction industry, plus the latest on the Steven Donziger and Julian Assange cases.

These are the only states that would be policed under the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the requirement to “pre-clear” new, racially biased, voting procedures, such as limitations on early voting:

Alabama Georgia Louisiana Mississippi North Carolina South Carolina Texas Virginia Don’t get me wrong, the strangling of the John Lewis Act by filibuster, unlike the overhyped For the People Act, could be the death blow to a democratically elected Congress.

In 2013, Justice Kennedy said the Voting Rights Act would have been constitutional if it didn’t target specific states, a suggestion from New York City which was then under pre-clearance review.

While the new list is a rogues gallery of bad actors, there are real dangers in Ohio, Wisconsin, Arizona and Florida, not on the list. The Democratic Party has to grasp that vote suppression is serious in almost every state. Ironically, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema may be the victim of her own obstructionism.

Even with its limitations, the John Lewis Act would’ve been a very powerful weapon.

For example, the act would absolutely have prevented Cobb County, Georgia, from closing six of 11 early voting stations, all six in African-American neighborhoods.

So what now? While Attorney General Merrick Garland his filed suits against parts of Georgia’s new Jim Crow SB 202, action so far is slow, limited, and scatter shot.

Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/strangling-of-john-lewis-voting-rights-act-could-be-death-blow-for-democratically/

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This week, the Senate Republicans filibustered the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and stopped it from being voted into law in the Senate, even though there was a majority of 51 votes. A filibuster is just, literally, talking a bill to death so that the Senate cannot get on with its work. To close off that trick, to stop a filibuster, you need 60 votes, and only one Republican, Lisa Murkowski, crossed the line to vote for the bill.

Now, understand, the filibuster was specifically created by Southern Democrats after the Civil War for one single purpose: to prevent voting rights legislation and the protection of black people. In fact, one of the only times it was ever used was in 1922 to block the passage of a national law against lynching. So, until very recently, it’s been used almost exclusively for one purpose, that is to block rights of black people to vote. Now, it's been used lately by Republicans for all kinds of things, but basically it's a Jim Crow tactic.

This is not about vaccinations, this is about STUPID. There’s a pandemic of pin-heads, an epidemic of stupid.

[Oct 25, 2021: Charlottesville, VA] Jury selection began today for the civil trial of the organizers of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. The rally ended with the murder of Heather Heyer and injuries to dozens of other activists. The case was brought by a group of individuals that were attacked during the tiki torch march across the University of Virginia’s Charlottesville campus on August 11, 2017 and the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville the next day.

If successful, the lawsuit, which seeks large monetary damages, could have wide-reaching repercussions. The plaintiffs hope that it will ultimately bankrupt the hate groups behind the far-right events and bring their activities to a halt.

Zach D. Roberts, who filmed the 2017 Charlottesville violence for the Palast Investigative Fund, joins Greg Palast and FlashPoints host Dennis J. Bernstein to talk about the case.

Read Roberts' exclusive report: https://www.gregpalast.com/hate-goes-on-trial-in-charlottesville/

Right now, the darkness is falling on Afghanistan, and we are responsible.

Human rights lawyer Steven Donziger, who led a $9.5 billion suit against chevron, sentenced to six months for contempt.

Learn more about this extraordinary case: https://www.gregpalast.com/facing-prison-for-fighting-chevron/

Stand with Steven at: https://FreeDonziger.com.

FreeDonziger #BigOil #Pollution #Environment #Amazon #HumanRights #StevenDonziger

On this week's Reality Check, Greg Palast stands in for regular host Cary Harrison and interviews human rights lawyer Steven Donziger and "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" author John Perkins.

Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/fact-injection-donziger-v-chevron/

Should we pass laws against bank robbery by asking the bank robbers? Manchin's talking about asking the vote thieves to agree to end their crime wave — that ain't going to happen! #FreedomToVoteAct

Listen to The Network soliloquy that Ed Asner gamely voiced for Greg Palast's bestselling book Armed Madhouse

Take a listen to learn why Asner was recognized as the best voice actor on the planet. This is his reading of Greg Palast's investigation of Walmart, “What Price a Storegasm?” from the 2002 edition of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

On Monday, a state Superior Court in Raleigh, North Carolina ruled to allow ex-cons to vote — even if they haven’t paid old fines. The GOP is freaking. Here’s why: a University of Minnesota study found 89% of ex-cons vote Democratic, no matter their color. Too bad the Democrats are MIA on registering ex-cons. I’ve calculated that over 9 million ex-cons are ELIGIBLE to vote — but need help and guidance getting through the berzerko rules for ex-cons to register — which ain’t so easy for non-cons either. Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/the-ex-con-con-job/

Chevron set out to destroy Steven Donziger, to make an example of a human rights lawyer that dares take on the petroleum pirates. But the oil giant also went after journalists, in one case, filing a complaint against the BBC Television reporter that broke the story that Chevron had destroyed key evidence in the case. I was that reporter — and survived with my job after a year of hearings. But Chevron’s prosecution did a damn good job of scaring off other journalists.

Some were scared off; some bought off. PBS News Hour wouldn’t touch the death-by-oil story. The official chief sponsor of the PBS News Hour? Chevron.

Here’s the story, broadcast by BBC (https://youtu.be/W1FIXwtfvBs) and, in the US, by Democracy Now!, the story you won’t find on the Petroleum Broadcast System.

I’ve gone way out of my way to get ChevronTexaco’s side of the story. I finally chased them down in Ecuador’s capital, Quito. I showed them a study of the epidemic of childhood leukemia centered on where their company dumped oil sludge. (https://chevroninecuador.org/assets/docs/childhood-leukemia.pdf)

Here’s their reply:

“And it’s the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States?”

Texaco’s lawyer, Rodrigo Perez, was chuckling and snorting.

“Scientifically, nobody has proved that crude causes cancer.”

OK, then. But what about the epidemiological study about children with cancer in the Amazon traced to hydrocarbons?

The parents of the dead kids, he said, would have some big hurdles in court:

“If there is somebody with cancer there, they must prove it is caused by crude or by the petroleum industry. And, second, they have to prove that it is OUR crude.”

Perez leaned over with a huge grin.

“Which is absolutely impossible.”

He grinned even harder.

Maybe some guy eating monkeys in the jungle can’t prove it. And maybe that’s because the evidence of oil dumping was destroyed.

Deliberately, by Chevron.

I passed the ChevronTexaco legal duo a document from their files labeled “Personal y confidential.” They read in silence. They stayed silent quite a while. Jaime Varela, Chevron’s lawyer, was wearing his tan golf pants and white shoes, an open shirt and bespoke blue blazer. He had a blow-dried bouffant hairdo much favored by the ruling elite of Latin America and skin whiter than mine, a color also favored by the elite.

Jaime had been grinning too. He read the memo. He stopped grinning. The key part says,

“Todos los informes previos deben ser sacados de las oficinas principales y las del campo, y ser destruidos.”

“. . . Reports . . . are to be removed from the division and field offices and be destroyed.”

It came from the company boss in the States, “R. C. Shields, Presidente de la Junta.”

Removed and destroyed. That smells an awful lot like an order to destroy evidence, which in this case means evidence of abandoned pits of deadly drilling residue. Destroying evidence that is part of a court action constitutes fraud.

In the United States, that would be a crime, a jail-time crime. OK, gents, you want to tell me about this document?

“Can we have a copy of this?” Varela asked me, pretending he’d never seen it before in his life.

I’ll pretend with them, if that gets me information. “Sure. You’ve never seen this?”

The ritual of innocence continued as they asked a secretary to make copies. “We’re sure there’s an explanation,” Varela said. I’m sure there is. “We’ll get back to you as soon as we find out what it is.”

I’m still waiting.

Learn more about #StevenDonziger and why he's facing prison for fighting Chevron: https://www.gregpalast.com/facing-prison-for-fighting-chevron/

StevenDonziger #FreeDonziger #BigOil #Pollution #Environment #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #Activism

Calling in to the FlashPoints News studio from his new New York home, where he is currently under house arrest, rights attorney Steven Donziger talks about his Kafkaesque case with host Dennis J. Bernstein and investigative reporter Greg Palast.

Palast has been reporting on this outrageous tale of oil, power, corruption, corporate murder and ecocide since 2007, when he first met one of Donziger’s clients, Emergildo Criollo, Chief of the Cofan people, deep in the Amazon rainforest. With the help of Donziger, Criollo had launched a David v. Goliath lawsuit against Chevron for poisoning the rainforest and the people who lived in it — the Chief’s two sons being among the many victims of the oil giant’s murderous sludge.

The Ecuadorian courts ruled in Criollo’s favor, finding that Chevron’s Texaco operation had illegally dumped 16 billion gallons of deadly oil waste, but that was just the beginning of Donziger’s battle.

Chevron were ordered to pay Criollo and the other indigenous co-plaintiffs $9.5 billion. Rather than pay up, and to distract attention from their own mass industrial poisoning, Chevron set out to destroy Donziger, to make an example of a human rights lawyer that dares take on the petroleum pirates.

Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/facing-prison-for-fighting-chevron/

Support Donziger and join the fight: https://www.donzigerdefense.com

Transcript of interview: https://www.gregpalast.com/why-am-i-the-one-locked-up-and-not-chevron

In this edition of The Critical Hour, hosts Garland Nixon and Wilmer Leon talk to Greg Palast about the recent assassination of Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse, and the trail of blood that leads back to the United States. The trio also discuss the socio-economic background against which this murder happened, and how the economy of this mineral and agriculturally rich Caribbean nation has been systematically stripped — and, to this end, its stability and security systematically undermined — by multinational corporations backed by the IMF, World Bank and the US government.

Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/mercenary-op-behind-haiti-assassination-tried-this-before/

On Thursday, July 1, the Supreme Court gave states new latitude to impose restrictions on voting, using a ruling in a case from Arizona to signal that challenges to laws being passed by the Republican legislatures that make it harder for minority groups to vote would face a hostile reception from a majority of the justices. This was a six to three vote, with the court’s three liberal members in dissent. The decision was among the most consequential in decades on voting rights. And it was the first time the court had considered how a crucial part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 applies to restrictions that have a particular impact on people of color.

A little-noticed provision in Georgia’s new voting restriction law, SB202, threatens the rights of 364,000 voters. The new provision signed into law in March allows private citizens to challenge an “unlimited” number of other voters’ ballots. The result is that hundreds of thousands of voters individually targeted by a conservative group from Texas may not have their ballots counted in next year’s crucial US Senate race and the expected re-match for the Governorship between Stacey Abrams and incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp.

Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/uncovered-illegal-attack-on-364000-georgia-voters/

Who would have ever thought that it would be one lone Democratic Senator that would finally put an end our democratic voting system? The one person, one vote ideal we've been trying to achieve in this country. Maybe it's time now to make Joe Manchin’s name into a verb, as in “Manchining” — as in crippling a structural system of voting. As in, he “Manchined” the voting system, and can you believe it, he's a Democrat?

In this week's edition of the Election Crimes Bulletin, Greg Palast and Dennis Bernstein talk about this and other insanities happening in the world of elections.

Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/is-it-time-we-made-manchin-a-verb/

If you let Texans vote, and you stop gerrymandering them, it's not even a purple state, it's a deep blue state, but...

The poisoning of the environment can only happen because of the poisoning of politics.

Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/deepwater-horizon-corporate-homicide/

SB202: Follow the money… It's not just about letting black people vote, it’s about letting a progressive agenda advance. Jim Crow has been a profit center for corporate America for generations, and we're calling it out.

Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/hidden-horrors-in-the-georgia-vote-law/

The only person who’s safe under Georgia’s new anti-voting law is Jim Crow. The bill’s 95 pages long and every page is a new horror show — it’s like Stephen King wrote it.

Even before this act of terror happened, I can’t overemphasize how brutal the voter suppression was aimed at the Asian-American community — particularly in Georgia. And when you don't have political power, you don't have protection. The intimidation factor is very high — and it's coming from the top.

Learn More: https://www.gregpalast.com/voting-gangnam-style-the-rise-of-kim-crow/

The Asian-American community is the fastest growing community in Atlanta and it’s the one that put Warnock and Ossoff over the top — and that scares the hell out of Georgia Republicans. So the Asian-American community are the prime target of their vote suppression attacks — it’s not just Jim Crow, now it’s Kim Crow.

The FBI is congratulating themselves on finding and arresting Capitol rioters — BUT WHY DID THEY LET THEM OUT OF THEIR CUSTODY IN THE FIRST PLACE?

The FBI manual REQUIRES sealing off a murder crime scene — and arresting or at least getting the names and CELL PHONES with incriminating photos.

Instead the rioters were given a f#@!ing police escort out of the crime scene.

The investigation of January 6 must include the decision to let killers walk away — and FBI/police sympathy or even infiltration.

Greg Palast on The Chip Franklin Show — March 12, 2021

For those of you who wanted to see Donald Trump skedaddled from the White House, this is the week you should be celebrating Thanksgiving giving thanks to Indigenous peoples for giving Biden the White House. The Native People’s vote provided the margin for Biden in Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona.

In Arizona, for example, the Tohono O’odham nation voted 98% Democratic!

If it were up to White folk, Trump would have walked away with Arizona, but Indigenous precincts in Navajo Nation lands reported a 60% to 90% vote for Biden-Harris.

The Indigenous vote has been crucial before. In 2004, Native Nations gave John Kerry the votes he needed to win New Mexico and the presidency, but Kerry was never inaugurated… Because those native votes were never counted.

That’s right. Never counted.

Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/gop-trail-of-tears/

The Trump Treasury has ordered the Federal Reserve to shut down its program backing loans to small business and local government. This is like Hitler in his bunker who ordered his minions to blow up bridges, railways and the electric system when his demise was clear. The difference is, that in Hitler’s case, even his Nazi underlings refused the order to sabotage their nation. This is no joke: it’s a program to push the American economy over a cliff by Inauguration Day. Sick, vindictive, treasonous.

The fight over what’s left of the soul of the Republican Party has moved from Washington DC to Georgia with the far right continuing to rally for Trump.

Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/white-power-and-the-recount/

The Jon Ossoff / David Purdue race looks to me like a straight up steal. For example, in Gwinnett County, which is a suburban county of Atlanta, a staggering 30% of mail-in votes have been rejected, and we know it's overwhelmingly Democratic. There's also a massive number of provisional ballots that weren’t counted. I understand that it's 10,000 — at least — in Atlanta and the surrounding area. And we know 40% of all provisional ballots nationwide are thrown out.

URGENT: We need to get ALL the 198,351 voters wrongly purged from Georgia's voter rolls reinstated/re-registered in time to vote in the January 5 run-off elections — registration deadline: Dec 7.

Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/how-to-stop-the-purge-from-stealing-the-georgia-runoff/

Greg Palast and Dennis Bernstein discuss The Purged — The Vanishing Voters of Trump's America.

The Election Crimes Bulletin offers essential election protection in the run up to the big day — and beyond!

Tune in at 5PM PT weekdays between now and #ElectionDay for more Election Crimes Bulletins or catch up by visiting the Flashpoints' archives at: https://kpfa.org/program/flashpoints/

In light of the fact that the Post Office has been sabotaged, Greg Palast and Dennis Bernstein offer strategies to ensure you don't accidentally sabotage your own vote.

The Election Crimes Bulletin offers essential election protection in the run up to the big day — and beyond!

Tune in at 5PM PT weekdays between now and #ElectionDay for more Election Crimes Bulletins or catch up by visiting the Flashpoints' archives at: https://kpfa.org/program/flashpoints/

Thomas Jefferson didn't imagine that we would have a reality TV show star who would start an insurrection by Twitter.

Tune in at 5PM PT weekdays between now and #ElectionDay for more Election Crimes Bulletins or catch up by visiting the Flashpoints' archives at: https://kpfa.org/program/flashpoints/

In the first of a daily series of Election Crimes Bulletins, Dennis Bernstein and Greg Palast discuss the unique problems voters face in Wisconsin and Florida.

Palast and Nader discuss the ultimate constitutional crime.

Vice presidential debate analysis with political commentators Pastor Mike McBride and George Galvis and investigative reporter Greg Palast.

Donald Trump apparently won Michigan by 10,700 votes. But in Detroit, over 75,000 ballots were never counted. The barriers to voting are enormous, and yet even when people make it through those barriers, their vote, isn't always counted. Greg Palast tell us what we can do to help protect the vote.

They're hostile to counting the vote in the United States for voters of color and for young people, that's just the truth. We still have an apartheid vote counting system and they will do everything to get in your way... There were 7.9 million votes not counted or voters blocked in the 2016 election. That figure’s from the United States Election Assistance Commission, which keeps track not only of our votes, but the votes we throw away, the votes we don't count. Other nations would be flabbergasted to learn that we literally throw away millions of ballots, but they're not of any color. It’s 900% more likely that your vote will be disqualified if you're black than if you're white.

In this edition of the Election Crimes Bulletin, Palast and Bernstein got on the hunt for America's vanished voters, and encourage you to take action to protect your vote now!

The Republicans could use the fraudulent hysteria they’ve whipped up about vote-by-mail fraud to steal the presidency in the event that Donald Trump fails to win the Electoral College. Constitutional expert Thom Hartmann and I are concerned the GOP-controlled Legislatures could claim that mail-in ballots are fraudulent and thereby refuse to certify a Democratic win in states such as Wisconsin and Georgia. By refusing to send electors to the Electoral College and thereby denying any candidate 270 votes in the Electoral College, under Article XII of the Constitution, the election shifts to the House of Representatives whose members will cast one vote per state — Wyoming gets the same vote as California. Trump would then be “reelected” even if he loses both the popular vote and the Electoral College. That’s what happened in 1824 when John Quincy Adams LOST the popular vote and electoral vote but was elected by the House — a total swindle!

In this edition of the Election Crimes Bulletin, Palast and Bernstein explore the real and present danger presented by Article XII of the Constitution. They also reveal how the GOP have used and abused the legal system to snatch victory from the jaws of recent defeats in Texas and Wisconsin, and how Georgia’s Brian Kemp has colluded with right-wingers in the judiciary to do away with an election altogether, because why bother stealing an election if you can simply cancel it and appoint a winner instead?

To learn more and to get a transcript of the show, or a copy of Palast's new book, How Trump Stole 2020, visit: https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-could-be-reelected-even-if-he-loses-the-electoral-college/

Greg Palast previews his new book, How Trump Stole 2020, which serves as a warning and a blueprint for how we can steal the election back!

s the deadly coronavirus pandemic spread across the U.S., Democratic primary elections in many states have been delayed, owing to public health officials’ urging Americans to maintain social distance. But when Tony Evers, the Democratic governor of Wisconsin, issued an executive order to postpone the primary and a contest for a Supreme Court seat and other local offices until June 9, the Republican-controlled legislature and Republican-dominated State Supreme Court opposed the move. After the U.S. Supreme Court Republican majority blocked an extension for absentee voting, state residents were forced to risk COVID-19 exposure while waiting in long lines in a small number of understaffed polling places. Democrats charged that Republicans had exploited the pandemic for political advantage, given that a smaller voter turnout usually favors GOP candidates.

The spring election battle in Wisconsin foreshadows the tough choices ahead for state governments as they navigate the coronavirus pandemic to ensure primaries and this November’s presidential election, go forward with wide participation. Legislators including Rep. Mark Pocan, Democrat of Wisconsin and co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, along with Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar are urging legislation to enact a national vote-by-mail requirement in all 50 states for every federal election in 2020.

Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Greg Palast, well known for his investigative reports for BBC television, Rolling Stone and The Guardian focusing on massive voter purges that result in voter disenfranchisement. Here, he cautions against the rush to mail-in ballots without first recognizing the hazards and the need to implement safeguards to ensure every vote counts in this November’s critical presidential election.

In this week’s Election Crimes Bulletin, Greg Palast and Flashpoints host Dennis Bernstein discuss the problems we face exercising our democratic rights during a pandemic. Voting by Mail may seem like the solution, but mail-in ballots could deliver the election to Trump.

Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/our-choice-may-be-vote-by-mail-or-die/

COVID-19 has caused eleven states to reschedule their elections. Several more are still scheduled to be held this month. As states attempt to figure out how to safely run elections in the midst of a coronavirus pandemic, many see voting by mail as the solution. But there are pitfalls. In this interview with civil rights leader and Igniting Change host Barbara Arnwine, first broadcast on NewsTalk 1450 FM on March 31, investigative journalist Greg Palast says that rather than creating a precedent for cancelling elections, we should embrace mail-in ballots so we can vote without the risk of dying. However, he also explains that we need to make urgent changes to our voting system to make sure every mail-in ballot counts — and breaks down what those essential changes are.

From the studios of KPFA in Berkeley, California, the Election Crimes Bulletin with investigative journalist Greg Palast and Flashpoints host Dennis Bernstein returns for another election season. In this edition, Palast and Bernstein go to Milwaukee and Wisconsin to report on election fraud. And as DNC chair Tom Perez continues to obstruct the real results from Iowa, we also take a look at the efforts to deprive Bernie Sanders of a win there. But first Palast reveals some YUGE breaking news out of Georgia…

Trump's going to steal the 2020 election. It doesn't matter how good the Democrat's campaign is, or how much they spend on ads, because we have an apartheid voting system that takes away the votes of Black, Brown, Hispanic, and young people en mass.

Most Americans — Republican, Democrat, white, Black, whatever — actually believe that everyone who’s a citizen should be allowed to vote and that every vote should be counted. I think most Americans are actually quite horrified by these games.

But there's a simple cure for all this vote-thieving trickery — but you have to know you've been purged or never had your name properly entered on the voters toll. So check your voter registration, and if there's a problem, reregister online.

Do it NOW... before it's too late!

Learn more about how you can protect your vote and make sure it counts by signing up for our newsletter at GregPalast.com/subscribe

The latest voter suppression trick is called use it or lose it. If you don't vote in two elections, they send you a postcard. If you don't respond to a postcard, you're removed from the voter rolls. Now, it is illegal to remove someone from a voter roll for not voting. Because in America you have the right not only to vote, you have the right not to vote.

So how can they remove people for not voting? Because they're saying if you don't vote in a couple of elections, you don't respond to postcard, well, you've obviously moved. I tested this in Georgia. Georgia removed half a million people from the voter rolls before the election between Stacey Abrams and Brian Kemp. Abrams is the first black woman in American history to run for governor. She was running against Brian Kemp, who like Kris Kobach was also Secretary of State in charge of the voter rolls. So Kemp removed half a million people from the voter rolls — overwhelmingly voters of color — and runs for governor.

He refused to resign his post running the election while he was running for governor. I sued him, got the list of people he removed from the voter rolls on the grounds that they had left the state or they'd moved. I had experts from Silicon Valley, four expert firms, go through name by name — not a sample, but actually named by name — and we found 340,134 voters were wrongly removed from the voter rolls, who had never left their homes. They didn't move, they didn’t even move down the street. And that elected Kemp as Governor of Georgia over Abrams. And the one thing that's refreshing is she’s suing the state — the very first Democrat ever to sue a state, saying an election was stolen by racist means.

Learn more at GregPalast.com

"Trump stole the election. He did it the old fashioned way — by blocking a lot of people of color from voting.”

Palast talks to Michael G. Haskins on WBAI's Living For The City.

Listen to the full show and more Living For The City here: https://wbai.org/archive/program/episode/?id=5935

VoterSuppression #ElectionFraud #Crosscheck #InterstateCrosscheck #KrisKobach #KKKobach #VoterPurge #VotingRights #CivilRights #Elections #Voting #Election2016 #TrumpStoleIt #Election2020 #StopTheSteal #StealBackYourVote #RestoreTheVRA #GregPalast #TheBestDemocracyMoneyCanBuy

Stolen again. Democrat Dan McCready supposedly lost the special election in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District to Republican Dan Bishop by less than 4,000 votes. However, racially biased vote suppression schemes easily account for the supposed GOP victory margin. Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/jim-crow-steals-n-carolina-9th-cd/

Stolen again. Democrat Dan McCready supposedly lost the special election in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District to Republican Dan Bishop by less than 4,000 votes. However, racially biased vote suppression schemes easily account for the supposed GOP victory margin. Learn more: gregpalast.com/jim-crow-steals-n-carolina-9th-cd/

On this edition of Flashpoints we talk about how Trump’s Mexico tariffs will crush the US economy.

Greg Palast discusses the new charges WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange faces under the Espionage Act with Critical Hour host, political scientist, author and nationally syndicated columnist. Dr. Wilmer Leon.

"We have a First Amendment for a reason, and it doesn't say unless it's embarrassing to the U.S. government, unless Hillary Clinton doesn't like it, unless it makes it difficult for the State Department to play the games it plays," says Palast. "The point is we are government of the people, by the people. It's not their information. It's ours. And all Julian Assange did was give us our information which our own government was wrongly and illegally concealing from us."

In this episode of Flashpoints, first broadcast by KPFA on April 11, 2019, Greg Palast and host Dennis J. Bernstein discuss Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, WikiLeaks, press freedom, Brexit, and more....

Listen to the full show here: https://kpfa.org/episode/flashpoints-april-11-2019/

Kris Kobach has a long history of racism. He started out as a lawyer for a white supremacist group called FAIR, which says its purpose is to maintain a European majority America. He's the author of SB 1070, which the ACLU calls the Driving While Brown law. He's the guy who came up with a racially biased voter purge program called Interstate Crosscheck, which helped elect Donald Trump in 2016, and Brian Kemp over Stacey Abrams in 2018. He came up with the idea of putting the citizenship question on the census. He's also very proud of the fact he came up with the idea for Trump's wall — and that Mexico would pay for it.

Kobach, for all his wacky moves, is a brilliant and dangerous spider in the Right Wing web. He has law degrees from Yale, Harvard, and Oxford, and therefore he’s a master criminal, in the sense that he has violated the law again, and again, and again — particularly a document called The Constitution. But he’s brilliant at coming up with sophisticated and bogus arguments, making stuff sound reasonable and legal, when it’s not even close to it.

The reason Trump wants to create the Immigration Czar job for him is that it doesn’t have to be confirmed by the Senate. The Republican senators from Kansas — Kobach's own state — said they wouldn’t vote to confirm him if he were named for a cabinet post like Homeland Security. And this is worse. This puts him in charge of Homeland Security.

Learn more: https://gregpalast.com/trump-may-name-kris-kobach-new-immigration-czar/

Palast on Drive Time with Dave Glover by Greg Palast

Gerrymandering, voter suppression, a crisis at the border, all these things go together, and that’s why Kobach is so dangerous…The truth is he’s kind of like a Steve Bannon, he’s a very brilliant guy with a very widespread understanding of how all these thing interlock in a most dangerous way. They cannot win in America legitimately because of the demographics, this is a changing nation. It's not about securing the borders, it's not about stopping illegal aliens, it's not about stopping drug traffic, it's about creating hysteria so they can stop certain groups of legitimate voters from voting. That's the real agenda that's being completely missed by the mainstream media. And it’s a way to effectively cut the vote by cutting the census count in Hispanic congressional districts. It’s quite brilliant. If you want to beat Beto O’Rourke out of Texas, take away his voter base by scaring them off. And if you want to take away Democratic control of the House, you simply shrink Democratic districts. You shrink the population in those districts so you can gerrymander them. Learn more at: GregPalast.com

KrisKobach #VoterSuppression #Gerrymandering #ElectionFraud #Election2020

Vote theft is class war by other means.

Palast explains the situation in Venezuela, where the Trump administration has recently been signaling for U.S.-backed regime change. Although the claim is that it’s the U.S.’s duty to support “democracy,” says Palast, the concern is really for Venezuelan oil. Major players like the Koch brothers need reliable access to Venezuela’s particular form of heavy crude oil, and the Maduro government doesn’t play ball the way the Saudis, for example, do. Now Maduro’s political opponent, Juan Guiado, is openly calling for outside military support in his attempt to overthrow Maduro. Palast is adamant that that would be an utter catastrophe both for the U.S. and for the Venezuelan people.

While pundits are falling all over themselves spewing about the "civility" of the patrician George H. B. Bush, l must honor the memory those 50 men who were buried alive in a gold field in Africa so Bush Sr. could cash in.

To me, this is the most important story of my career — and almost ended it when Bush’s gold mining company (I bet you didn’t know he had one) sued my paper, The Guardian, threatening it with bankruptcy for telling the truth.

But ultimately, the truth was also buried alive, as US papers refused to cover the story, fearing the gold company’s wrath. (Salon.com was the exception.)

I dedicate this story to those miners, buried without pomp, buried by bulldozers while still alive. And to Tundu Lissu the Tanzanian lawyer, father of twins, who risked his life to provide me the corroborating evidence.

Tundu has taken twelve bullets, but survives.

Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/poppy-strikes-gold-bush-sr-made-a-killing-50-miners-buried-alive/

[From my spoken word CD, Weapon of Mass Instruction, Alternative Tentacles.]

"Have You Checked Your Registration Yet?" asks Palast. Plus tips on how to make sure your vote counts.

Interview first broadcast on September 10, 2018

Palast on The Thom Hartmann Show: Black officials stop mass closure of polling stations in Randolph County, but Kemp told henchmen to shutter polling stations statewide ahead of election against Abrams.

Palast on KPFA Flashpoints with Dennis J Bernstein: Greg Palast asks why the Democratic party ignores the GOP voter suppression of minority voters and goes after vote suppressor and chief, Kris Kobach, currently a candidate for Governor of Kansas.

If you believe the Republican hysteria machine, there’s an unprecedented election crime wave sweeping America involving a staggering 7.2 million suspected double voters. Thousands of these supposed criminals — who, if found guilty, have committed a felony punishable by 5-years in the slammer — have already lost their right to vote, with 41,000 people in Virginia alone being struck off voter roles. Statistical analysis of the evidence uncovered by investigative reporter Greg Palast shows that one million Americans may lose their vote by November. It also shows that a high proportion of these black, white, and brown voters have one thing in common: they tend to vote blue. In this week’s Best Democracy Money Can Buy: Election Crimes Bulletin, Palast gives Flashpoints’ Dennis J. Bernstein the skinny on this election crime wave, which in reality is little more than a GOP-generated racist sham designed to filter the blue out of the votes at the polls.

Episode 16 - With Trump being an unpredictable wild card in this year’s election race, his cabal of new billionaire hedge fund buddies are hedging their bets by buying Congress and the Senate, so no matter which blonde gets into office, they can be sure that their interests are taken care of. To do this, in some key swing states, they’re spending millions betting against a Trump White House. In this week’s Best Democracy Money Can Buy: Election Crimes Bulletin, Flashpoints’ Dennis J. Bernstein and investigative reporter Greg Palast discuss the special needs of these mega-rich vote-manipulating vultures and the specifics of what they hope to get in return for their election-rigging investments.

Trump is a loaded weapon let loose on this election, and now he's backed by 13 people he once called "losers." Let's take a look at who these guys are and just what they've in mind for this election, shall we?

"The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" is a weekly election crimes bulletin that airs on KPFA on Flashpoints with Dennis Bernstein. Tune in or subscribe for the latest information on how this election is being stolen, and what you can do to stop the theft.

This week, we discuss Trump and his claims of voter fraud, as touted in his assertions that "in [his] opinion we have people who are voting many, many times."

"The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" is a weekly election crimes bulletin that airs on KPFA on Flashpoints with Dennis Bernstein. Tune in or subscribe for the latest information on how this election is being stolen, and what you can do to stop the theft.

Stop us if you've heard this before, but 10 nuns walk into a voting booth... let's dig a little into who Mike Pence is, and what that means for these nuns.

"The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" is a weekly election crimes bulletin that airs on KPFA on Flashpoints with Dennis Bernstein. Tune in or subscribe for the latest information on how this election is being stolen, and what you can do to stop the theft.

Sometimes advice comes from the most unlikely places - taking cues from Pat Robertson, it's time to look past the moment of the Democratic nomination to the movement that Sanders has started.

"The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" is a weekly election crimes bulletin that airs on KPFA on Flashpoints with Dennis Bernstein. Tune in or subscribe for the latest information on how this election is being stolen, and what you can do to stop the theft.

Looks like Hillary Clinton has dodged the FBI investigation into her misuse of her personal email server, all thanks to learning how to slip out of grasp from her history with some rather "oily" characters in Kazakhstan.

"The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" is a weekly election crimes bulletin that airs on KPFA on Flashpoints with Dennis Bernstein. Tune in or subscribe for the latest information on how this election is being stolen, and what you can do to stop the theft.

With the national convention and the road to presidency ahead, many people are asking if Trump can span those last few inches, financially, to win the election. That mainly depends on who he has backing him - enter billionaire bandit John Paulson, the foreclosure king.

"The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" is a weekly election crimes bulletin that airs on KPFA on Flashpoints with Dennis Bernstein. Tune in or subscribe for the latest information on how this election is being stolen, and what you can do to stop the theft.

The Associated Press has declared the CA Primary over with a "crushing victory" for Hillary Clinton and 96% of votes counted... but just how is that possible with hundreds of thousands of provisional and mail-in ballots are still unprocessed? It's time to go back to the scene of the crime to see what we, as voters, can do.

"The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" is a weekly election crimes bulletin that airs on KPFA on Flashpoints with Dennis Bernstein. Tune in or subscribe for the latest information on how this election is being stolen, and what you can do to stop the theft.

For the full episode of Flashpoints, please visit: http://www.flashpoints.net/?p=5345

During this special Election Crimes Bulletin, Greg Palast and Dennis Bernstein discuss what to do to make sure the NPP vote is heard during the California Democratic Primary. Bruce Carter of Black Men for Bernie and Paul Thomas of Election Justice USA weigh in.

"The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" is a weekly election crimes bulletin that airs on KPFA on Flashpoints with Dennis Bernstein. Tune in or subscribe for the latest information on how this election is being stolen, and what you can do to stop the theft.

Greg Palast and Dennis Bernstein discuss Hillary's history as a Manchurian Candidate and the select secret deals the Clintons have struck with the Republican Party.

"The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" is a weekly election crimes bulletin that airs on KPFA on Flashpoints with Dennis Bernstein. Tune in or subscribe for the latest information on how this election is being stolen, and what you can do to stop the theft.

Greg Palast and Dennis Bernstein reveal how California poll workers have been told to give all independent voters "provisional" ballots if they want to vote in Democratic Party. That’s illegal — and to insure that Sanders voter’s ballots end up in the garbage, uncounted.

"The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" is a weekly election crimes bulletin that airs on KPFA on Flashpoints with Dennis Bernstein. Tune in or subscribe for the latest information on how this election is being stolen, and what you can do to stop the theft.

Don’t go postal with your vote: 488,000 mail-in ballots end up in the dumpster. Investigative reporter Greg Palast lays out the ugly facts to Dennis Bernstein in the latest installment of, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy —the Election Crime Report."

"The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" is a weekly election crimes bulletin that airs on KPFA on Flashpoints with Dennis Bernstein. Tune in or subscribe for the latest information on how this election is being stolen, and what you can do to stop the theft.

Greg Palast and Dennis Bernstein delve into the Hysteria Machine with movie star and Voto Latino spokeswoman Rosario Dawson, who was at UCLA this week with Greg Palast and other media experts for The Urgency of Now panel.

"The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" is a weekly election crimes bulletin that airs on KPFA on Flashpoints with Dennis Bernstein. Tune in or subscribe for the latest information on how this election is being stolen, and what you can do to stop the theft.

Greg Palast tells Dennis Bernstein about the myriad ways by which you can lose your vote and give useful tips on how you can protect your vote.

"The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" is a weekly election crimes bulletin that airs on KPFA on Flashpoints with Dennis Bernstein. Tune in or subscribe for the latest information on how this election is being stolen, and what you can do to stop the theft.

Greg Palast and Dennis Bernstein expose Donald Trump’s go-to operative who would steal your vote — by accusing you of not being an American. The Vote Rustler of the Week: Kris Kobach, Trump's man behind SB 1070, the "Driving While Brown" law.

"The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" is a weekly election crimes bulletin that airs on KPFA on Flashpoints with Dennis Bernstein. Tune in or subscribe for the latest information on how this election is being stolen, and what you can do to stop the theft.