Greg Palast

Why does it always come down to Georgia?

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.
 
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Armed and Masked Vigilantes Intimidate Voters in Arizona

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!
 

It was Brian Kemp’s family that first brought enslaved Africans to Georgia.

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. 
 

Georgia Voting Rights attorney: We are in a voter suppression state

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!
 

Ginni Thomas appears before Jan 6 Committee

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. 
 

Why do we even have voter registration?

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.
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It all comes down to Georgia

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!
 
 

The Politician Protection Racket

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 trouble with ERIC

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!

Brian Kemp: From witness to unindicted co-conspirator?

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!”
 
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