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Remember the name Team America. It sounds innocent, but it's a shadowy organization deep within the Trump administration that's working inter agency wise and with the Department of Justice's Civil Rights division to take away your right to vote. ProPublica just exposed it in a new expose. We've been talking on the Midas Dutch network and on Legal AF for a long time about the fact that Donald Trump swept into power members of the election denying movement. The election denying movement. There are at least 24 members of that movement, including lawyers that worked overtime to try to defeat and reverse the outcome of the 2020 election, who are now inside the government in key positions throughout the administration. FBI, the Department of National Intelligence, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and the rest. And Donald Trump has completely destroyed the guardrails that were in place in 2020. 75 people, career lawyers who were responsible for ensuring the integrity of the 2020 election are gone, replaced with these top 24 members of Team America, all as revealed by ProPublica. And I also just did an exclusive interview with Sky Perryman of Democracy Forward about her brand new law lawsuit. Her, her injunction lawsuit just filed in order to get to the bottom of the relationship of this conspiracy within the Trump administration at the highest level with the election denying network representatives. You're here on Midas Dutch and Legal af. Take a moment, hit that free subscribe button on Legal AF YouTube channel as well. Let's get down to the ProPublica reporting and then I'll stitch it together with my interview with Sky Perryman about her new lawsuit. Here's what they, here's what they're reporting. Reveals, led by Doug Clark, 75 people who guarded the vote and the integrity of the election in 2020 are gone. The CESA unit, right, the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency that was responsible for the integrity of the 2020 election that was originally created by Donald Trump after 2016 has been mothballed. Chloroformed, gone all. I mean, it's there, but it's doing other things. They've gotten them out of the vote protection business, meaning the main agency that was protecting the vote has been destroyed by Donald Trump. Now there are 24 people within the Trump administration in key positions sprinkled throughout who make up team America, as ProPublica talked about it, who are election deniers. Ten were active in trying to reverse the vote, primarily as lawyers. When we talk about the election denial movement, one of its leaders among many is Cleta Mitchell, used to be a partner at Foley and Lardner. I used to work at that law firm a million years ago, but got thrown out of the firm when they found out that she, behind the scenes, was. Was leading the election denying movement. She set up the Election of the Election Integrity Network, the ein. There's chapters in every state, you know. And her goal, Cleta Mitchell's goal, is to undermine people's belief in the credibility of our election system for her own purposes. She's also at the heart of the new lawsuit brought by Democracy Forward. Let's talk about what's been gutted, eliminated, fired or destroyed. That used to be part of the guardrail around our election and voting systems to protect them from Donald Trump. The National Security Council used to have an election Security group in order to make sure that we didn't have foreign interference into our elections, primarily from Russia to China, Iran and North Korea, that's been eliminated. The Office of National Intelligence, led by Tulsi Gabbard, who's busy trying to relitigate whether Donald Trump should have been impeached or not. She just eliminated the Foreign Malign Interference center. As a part of the Office of National Intelligence. You know, national intelligence is about 14 different agencies, including the CIA, that report to Tulsi Gabbard. They used to have this center, the Foreign Malign Interference center, which is exactly what it sounds like, because we know that Russia, China, Iran and North Korea and other bad actors have been trying to influence the outcome of the election. I'm not talking about collusion. We all have our own opinions about whether Donald Trump benefited from the interference, whether he. And whether he worked with them, that's another story. Whether he's a Russian asset, that's for another day, but certainly he benefited from the interference. So what do you do when you don't want the world to know whether there's been interference? You get rid of the center that was responsible for making sure there was no foreign interference. Now let's go to the FBI and Cash Patel, an election denier, a Jan6 supporter. Cash Patel had a unit that he inherited called the Public Corruption, the Public Corruption Team and a Foreign Interference Task Force. They're gone too, right? Because the other. The other units that match them symmetrically in the Office of National Intelligence in the Department of Justice have all been eliminated as well. So why not get rid of the Public Corruption Unit, the Foreign Interference Task Force? Because this administration doesn't want to know if there's foreign interference because they think it's in their behavior, in their behalf. The Department of Justice used to have something called the Public Integrity Section. In fact, that's where Jack Smith, the special counsel, came out of they don't really any longer. Its budget has been cut, its people have been fired, it's been reassigned to do other things not related to elections and voting. Now, within the Department of Justice, even the remaining units that used to protect the vote as part of their mission and mandate in their formation, like the Civil Rights Division, now headed by a leading candidate to be an Attorney General for the United States, Harmeet Dhillon. She's an election denier and she's taken the Civil Rights Division and with a memo that she issued about seven or eight months ago, said, oh no, the Civil Rights Division is not going to do the mandate of ensuring voting laws are complied with and to ensure that there's integrity in the vote and the elections. Oh no, our primary mission is to execute the Executive Orders of Donald Trump, the President, right I used to think about food constantly craving Skill repeat. 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So now you have the weaponization of the Civil Rights Division that's working in conjunction with the other criminal prosecution divisions of the Department of Justice, also led by election deniers to go after states like Georgia, counties like Fulton county and and in Arizona to try to grab ballots, steal ballots, continue this litigating in the public space, but through criminal processes and investigations. Whether the 2020 election was a fraudulent or not, that's already been settled. That is settled, but not to the Trump world. So we move forward from there into this Election Integrity Network. Now, I just interviewed Sky Perryman, who brought this complaint for injunctive relief to try to get to the bottom of the relationship between the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, FBI and the election denying movement, including Cleta Mitchell, including Mr. Neff, Eric Neff, including other people like the acting voting chief, Maureen Riordan. Frankly, they could have gone further in this. And this starts as a Freedom of Information act lawsuit. It will end hopefully with some sort of major bombshell lawsuit maybe centered around conspiracy theory, you know, conspiracy claims, I don't know. But first you got to get the information. You here's my clip of my interview this week with Sky Perryman.
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Play the clip first. We wanna find out what is going on. There's a lot of articles, there's a lot of doom scrolling. You can go on social media, you've done a lot of coverage. It's all good that people are alert and concerned. But we have to understand what this government is doing so that we know how we can fight back in the courts, so that people know what they can do to prevent their votes from being taken. And so we've been on a journey at Democracy Forward to figure that out. And one is with this requ that you're highlighting today that we've had to go to court because the administration is not turning over documents that the American people are entitled to see. And what we've really been requesting is we want to understand what communications are coming in and out of the Civil Rights Division. That's the division that Ms. Dillon leads for now. Maybe she'll get to lead the whole Department of Justice. It is a division that has seen, you know, it's been virtually decimated. The career employees. We have many wonderful civil rights attorneys at Democracy 4 that used to work in that division that feel that they no longer can. And the division is being weaponized. It's supposed to be there to protect people's right to vote, to protect your civil rights. And we've seen this administration really try to weaponize the division against those very things. So we are after, we want the documents, we want the communications, we want to know why the Department of Justice is communicating with people who are known election deniers. We want to know why some of those people are within the government. And so we served these requests, as we do, we waited the amount of time and of course, the government did not come forward in a transparent way. That would be how you or I would answer something and say, well, you must be mistaken. Here's all the communications. No, we're not, you know, touching your election. That's not what they did. They instead stonewalled. And so when they do that, we go to court. And that's what we filed last week.
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Now at the bottom of this is you've got this series of misrepresentations to federal courts led by people in Harmeet Dillon Civil Rights Division and in other places there is one major database that's being created. Trump refers to it and others as the SAVE database, led by the Department of Homeland Security, Social Security and the Postal Service about your mail in ballots. On the other hand, the Civil Rights Division and lawyers that used to work on trying to overturn the 2020 election are going after individual states, 30 of them, including the District of Columbia, to try to obtain our voter data, our, our, you know, sacrosanct voter data. And they're claiming that they're doing it under the Help Help America Vote Act Hava or the Voter Voter Registration act or the Civil Rights Act. The only problem with that, none of that gives them the entitlement to just grab voter data and certainly not to then use it to create this, you know, Elon Musk Wet Dream Doge inspired major database to try to federalize the elections. That's all this is about Trump trying to federalize and take over the midterm elections and the resistance inside, which is non existent and what we can do from the outside. So now the entire resistance has to come from outside because inside has been so corrupted, so hollowed out, so captured by Donald Trump and the election denying movement that we can't rely on them to protect our vote or the election or the integrity of our elections. So we have to do it ourselves. So that starting point is places like Democracy Forward and Sky Perryman filing suits like this about the what is the relationship internally. It starts with that knowledge. From there, substantive lawsuits can be filed and we'll continue to follow it right here as we always have from day one, from moment one in our sixth year. Midas Touch and Legal AF I'm Michael Popak. Until my next report. Can't get your fill of Legal af? Me neither. That's why we formed the Legal AF Substack. Every time we mention something in a hot take, whether it's a court filing or a oral argument, come over to the substack. You'll find the court filing and the oral argument there, including a daily roundup that I do called Wait for It Morning af. What else? All the other contributors from Legal AO are there as well. We got some new reporting, we got interviews, we got AD free versions of the podcast and hot takes where Legal AF on substack. Come over now to free subscribe
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