Election denial returns as focus with Vance’s ‘non-answer,’ new Trump indictment details

Ohio Sen. JD Vance, left, speaks to Sean Hannity on Fox News in the post-debate spin room Tuesday night in New York. “It’s about whether or not you are going to uphold the fundamental precepts of democracy.” “It should be a major issue for voters,” said Richard L. Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law, “because, really, it was an unprecedented attempt to steal an election.” More than just denial After Smith’s lastest filing was released, Trump went into a rage on his social media platform Truth Social, accusing the Justice Department of “COMPLETE AND TOTAL ELECTION INTERFERENCE” and saying he did “NOTHING WRONG.” Trump called Smith’s case against him a “SCAM,” and suggested that the timing of the filing so close to the election broke with Justice Department rules for avoiding unnecessary political influence. Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said her organization is involved in dozens of legal actions across the country in advance of next month’s election, from groups that she said are “setting the stage for this narrative that there is something nefarious at play, that there is something questionable, that the results of the election aren’t valid.” The litigation is clearly part of a broader strategy, largely on the political right and clearly borne out of what happened in 2020, to “launder” legitimacy for later election denial claims through the legal system, Lakin said. Shrum said Vance was clearly “talking to an audience of one, Donald Trump,” when he wouldn’t answer Walz‘s question about the 2020 election, but that his doing so didn’t do Trump any favors. “Trump has convinced a substantial part of his base, of the people who are voting for him, that there was something wrong with the election, but I don’t think Americans generally think that,” Shrum said.