The Morning Dispatch: Farcical (But Dangerous) Conspiracies From Trump’s Legal Team

Plus: School closures don’t follow the science.

The Dispatch Staff 2 hr ago

Happy Friday! We’re exhausted. You’ll understand why once you finish this newsletter.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

  • The CDC issued new guidance on Thursday urging Americans to limit or postpone Thanksgiving travel to limit the spread of COVID-19. “Travel may increase your chance of getting and spreading COVID-19. Postponing travel and staying home is the best way to protect yourself and others this year.”
  • Georgia completed its by-hand recount of 5 million ballots yesterday, and—despite uncovering 6,000 ballots overlooked in the initial process—it validated the initial outcome: Joe Biden won the state by more than 10,000 votes. Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger plans to certify the results later today.
  • The COVID-19 vaccine being developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca generated a strong immune response in older adults, according to an early study published yesterday. Late-stage trial results for the vaccine are expected to be released within a few weeks.
  • Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said yesterday he will allow several emergency Federal Reserve lending programs to expire at the end of the year. The programs—implemented in the spring to combat the coronavirus-induced recession—have “clearly achieved their objectives,” Mnuchin said. In a statement in response, the Federal Reserve said it “would prefer that the full suite of emergency facilities established during the coronavirus pandemic continue to serve their important role as a backstop for our still-strained and vulnerable economy.”
  • Initial jobless claims increased by 31,000 week-over-week to 742,000 last week, the Labor Department reported on Thursday. More than 20 million people were on some form of unemployment insurance during the week ending October 31, compared to 1.5 million people during the comparable week in 2019.
  • In an effort to slow the resurgence of the coronavirus in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom—who earlier this week apologized for attending a dinner party with people from other households—announced an overnight stay-at-home order that will go into effect on Saturday. “The virus is spreading at a pace we haven’t seen since the start of this pandemic and the next several days and weeks will be critical to stop the surge,” he said. “We are sounding the alarm.”
  • The United States confirmed 188,093 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday per the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, with 10.4 percent of the 1,817,267 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 2,031 deaths were attributed to the virus on Thursday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 252,514. According to the COVID Tracking Project, 80,698 Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID-19.

This Absurdity Continues

Thursday morning, President Trump teased an “Important News Conference” happening later in the afternoon in which his lawyers would lay out a “clear and viable path to victory” because the “pieces are very nicely falling into place.” The only accurate part of the tweet was that a news conference did, indeed, occur. It was just under two hours, and the Trump administration’s recently fired CISA Director Chris Krebs called it “the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history.”

Packed into a small room at the Republican National Committee headquarters, Trump’s lawyers—Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, and Sidney Powell—made debunked claim after debunked claim, alleging that “President Trump won by a landslide” and promising to “clean this mess up now” and “reclaim the United States of America for the people who vote for freedom.”

Powell—who accused Democratic and Republican candidates across the country of paying “to have the system rigged to work for them”—presented a wild claim involving former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez (who died in 2013) and voting machine software that “set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden.” Powell has been making a similar case for more than a week, floating vast conspiracies involving voting machines operated by a company called Dominion, and a second company called Smartmatic.

We’re running out of space in this newsletter, but Alec is out with a detailed Dispatch Fact Check—his sixth one addressing claims about Dominion—of the latest conspiracy. Here’s the last sentence:

“Powell and Giuliani have offered no evidence to connect the companies as they’ve made their claims, nor have they and other conspiracy theorists provided evidence that Dominion’s vote-tabulating software was created ‘to produce altered voting results in Venezuela for Hugo Chávez.’”

Reporters in the room—who Trump campaign aide Jason Miller mocked for wearing masks—asked the trio to provide evidence of their claims. “Your question is fundamentally flawed when you’re asking, ‘Where’s the evidence?’” Ellis responded. “You clearly don’t understand the legal process.” She said they “haven’t had the opportunity yet to present [the evidence] to the court.”

School Closures Do Not Follow the Science

On Thursday, New York public schools were shuttered again, after reopening for a scant eight weeks. “Given recent increases in transmission,” Chancellor Richard Carranza wrote in a letter to families on Wednesday, “we have reached a point in our City’s infection rate that requires all students to transition to remote learning. Beginning Thursday, November 19, all school buildings will be closed, and all learning will proceed remotely for all students, until further notice.”

The nation’s largest school district—with more than 1 million students in more than 1,200 schools—will pivot to online learning, as cases in New York City are again on the rise. Mayor Bill de Blasio’s reopening agreement with the city’s teacher’s union earlier this year targeted a 3 percent rate of test positivity, averaged over seven days, as the line at which the city would choose to shut down schools. This rule is somewhat arbitrary: New York state as a whole, for example, set the school closure trigger at 9 percent, three times as high as the city’s.

Not all schools in New York are closing, however. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York announced in a Wednesday press release that it would continue to allow its 62,000 students access to in-person instruction “irrespective of” New York City closing public schools. Catholic schools in New York “faithfully follow rigorous state health guidelines, and decisions regarding closures can be made on an as-needed, school-by-school-basis,” it said.

Worth Your Time

  • Kevin Williamson’s latest post on NRO’s The Corner is an all-timer. “What we are seeing now, in the twilight of Trump’s kookery, is the merger of QAnon, the Republican Party, and the large part of the conservative movement that earns its bread by peddling miracle veggie pills to gullible elderly people on the radio,” he writes. “This raises some uncomfortable questions for conservatives. One of those questions is: How long are we going to keep pretending that this madness isn’t madness? Another is: How long will we continue to pretend that what’s being broadcast by Fox News and talk radio is political commentary rather than the most shameful, irresponsible, and unpatriotic kind of sycophantic for-profit propaganda? A third is: What exactly is the benefit—for our ideas, and for the country—of making common cause with these lunatics and hucksters?”
  • In his new Substack newsletter, Matt Yglesias takes an ambitious stab at answering a difficult question: “What’s wrong with the media?” The problem, he postulates, is multifaceted. First and most obviously, the journalism field is composed of a very narrow demographic that largely skews left. Second, the opinions of career journalists are being passed up in favor of employees—like programmers and developers—with an untrained political eye. Lastly, the New York Times is growing its monopoly over the industry—both in readership and in the hiring of talented journalists. “So we’re left with a giant that’s incapable of self-scrutiny, because that might lead to implosion, paired with a set of institutions that increasingly all reflect the same worldview and do so in very strange ways.”
  • “Why are you making choices to make the world crueler than it needs to be and calling that being ‘woke?’” asks Professor Loretta J. Ross, who has dedicated her teaching at Smith College to combating cancel culture. In her latest for the  New York Times, Jessica Bennett profiles Ross’ lifelong commitment to feminism, social justice, and compassion—three things that shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. “The antidote to that outrage cycle, Professor Ross believes, is ‘calling in,’” writes Bennett. “Calling in is like calling out, but done privately and with respect.”

Presented Without Comment

andrew kaczynski🤔 @KFILE

The Trump campaign’s top legal advisor, attorney, and spokesperson Jenna Ellis previously repeatedly called Trump an “idiot,” and said his supporters didn’t care about “facts,” “logic” or that Trump was an “unethical, corrupt, lying, criminal, dirtbag.” Trump’s legal adviser Jenna Ellis in 2016 called him an ‘idiot’ and said his supporters didn’t care about ‘facts or logic’Jenna Ellis has been one of President Donald Trump’s most ardent defenders since joining his campaign as a legal adviser and surrogate a year ago, but in early 2016 she was one of his toughest critics and deeply opposed his candidacy, according to a <a href=“https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/18/politics/kfile-jenna-ellis-2016-trump-comments/index.html…cnn.com

November 18th 2020

3,332 Retweets

Toeing the Company Line

  • Three months ago, Israeli operatives killed Abu Muhammad al-Masri, an al-Qaeda emir who has been wanted by U.S. operatives for 22 years following his involvement in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. In his latest Vital Interests (🔒) newsletter, Thomas Joscelyn explains why it’s not surprising that Masri was gunned down in Tehran, given the “constellation of data points about the Iranian regime’s cooperation with al-Qaeda.”
  • On Thursday’s episode of the Advisory Opinions podcast, David and Sarah discuss the latest election litigation disputes, imminent lawless action in the context of the First Amendment, and two of their favorite television shows, Ted Lasso and Queen’s Gambit.

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), James P. Sutton (@jamespsuttonsf), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).
← Previous