Rachel Maddow dedicated time during her show on Monday to talking about the extent of the election fraud rot in the Republican Party. Acknowledging that Donald Trump is always going to hoover “up all the oxygen in the room,” Maddow said she wanted to broaden the scope to look at the GOP as a whole.
“There are at least 53 Republican officials and lawyers and activists who are facing felony criminal counts other than Donald Trump himself,” she said.
For example, in Arizona, recently indicted Sen. Jake Hoffman and election denier (and ethics failure) Liz Harris were elected to represent the state in the Republican National Committee. Hoffman is facing multiple felony counts related to his part in the “fake electors” scheme promoted by election deniers during and after the 2020 election, and Harris has a history of election denialism.
Maddow goes on to detail how ludicrous these RNC appointments are by any measure, and she finishes by reminding the audience of the disbarred, imprisoned, and legally compromised MAGA operatives who remain in the news, in the orange shadow of Trump.
I mean, just just look at Arizona for a second. In Arizona, they are not only running Kari Lake for Senate. This weekend. Arizona Republicans just chose their states representatives to the national Republican Party. You know, it’s called the, you know, it’s called the RNC, the Republican National Committee. It is actually a committee. Every state sends two people to be part of the committee that makes up the RNC, that makes up the national Republican Party.
Every state gets two choices. This weekend, Arizona Republicans picked their two choices. They decided their two choices would be this person, who was literally expelled from the state legislature recently, after only being there for about three months.
Here’s how that was described in the Arizona Republic:
‘She was expelled from the Republican controlled House just three months into her term. This after she staged an all day, live streamed legislative hearing at which her witnesses talked about the many ways in which our elections were supposedly stolen. The highlight was a Scottsdale insurance agent who slimed dozens of public officials and private citizens, making preposterous evidence free accusations that they all accepted bribes from the Sinaloa drug cartel.
‘The House Ethics Committee unanimously concluded that the state legislator not only knew what that insurance agent was likely to say during that hearing, but that the legislator actually took steps to hide the details from House leadership.
“‘Then she lied about it to the ethics panel. Now she’s a top ranking official in the Republican Party.’
She’s one of Arizona’s two representatives to the Republican National Committee, chosen this weekend by the Arizona Republican Party. But remember, they get to pick two. The second representative Arizona Republicans just chose to represent their state at the RNC. Is this person, who was a very special variety of Arizona Republican state senator.
Here’s how Lori Roberts at the Arizona Republic describes him today:
‘Meet Jake Hoffman, Arizona’s new Republican National Committee. Man, this Queen Creek Republican burst into public view in 2020 when he ran an internet troll farm paying teenagers to post conservative talking points and baseless conspiracy theories on social media—all aimed at getting then-President Donald Trump reelected.
‘The Washington Post in September 2020 exposed Hoffman’s ‘Rally Forge,’ a digital marketing firm where his job was to pay teenagers some of the minors to set up fake personas and blanket social media with thousands of nearly identical posts aimed at undermining confidence in the validity of the election and downplaying the impact of COVID-19.
;In other words, Jake Hoffman wanted to fool you into thinking these were real people spontaneously expressing deeply held conservative beliefs instead of what they were. A group of kids he was paying to deceive you. The posts cast doubt on the integrity of mail-In ballots, and said that Joe Biden is, quote, being controlled by behind the scenes individuals who want to take America down the dangerous path toward socialism. It’s the kind of thing you might expect to come out of Russia. Instead, it came out of Phenix, or more specifically, Jake Hoffman’s secret cell of paid teenage trolls.’
That troll farm in Phoenix was exposed in September of 2020. The same gentleman went on in December of 2020 to be one of the fake electors from Arizona, for Trump. He, in fact, is one of the fake electors who was just criminally indicted in Arizona for his alleged role in that scheme. So he was indicted last week and named Republican National Committeeman for the state of Arizona just days later.
So it’s not like they didn’t know he’d been indicted. They knew he was indicted, then they picked him afterward. There are at least 53 people who have now been criminally charged with participating in the effort to keep Trump in power after he lost reelection in 2020. And I’m not talking about the people who physically attacked Congress to try to intimidate and physically stop Congress from certifying the vote count on January 6. I mean, you can hive all of those hundreds of people off. There are still at least 53 Republican Party officials and lawyers and activists who are facing felony criminal counts, other than Donald Trump himself.
And, this is sort of, this is me making my case to you. I think it is an under-appreciated part of the politics of the Republican Party in the Trump era. I think it is an under-appreciated part of politics in our country right now, as Trump is trying to return to the presidency again, that not only is he in the dock facing felony criminal charges as he tries to return to the White House.
But also in the dock are the chair, or former chair, of the state Republican parties in Arizona and Michigan and Georgia and Nevada, and serving Republican elected officials in all of those states, and they are all swing states.
Trump adviser Peter Navarro is in jail right now. Today, the U.S. Supreme Court again rejected another request from him to get out of prison. He is currently serving time in prison for refusing to testify about his role in Trump’s efforts to overthrow the government. Trump attorney Jeff Clark just learned today that in his disbarment proceedings in California. The disciplinary counsel for the State Bar Association is arguing to the court that there is no sanction other than disbarment that is suitable for Jeff Clark, given what he did:
‘It would be inconsistent with our duty to the disciplinary system and to the profession to even suggest that a sanction other than disbarment should be contemplated by attempting to violate the rules of professional conduct. Jeffrey Clark, betrayed those oaths, and in doing so, his country’s lawyers who betray their country must be disbarred.’
And I know that the former president himself—former president and Republican presidential nominee, I know him. Him being on trial for multiple felonies is an amazing and unprecedented, and frankly astonishing spectacle. But stick a pin in that idea of ‘astonishing,’ right? Because the crime he is alleged to have quarterbacked, to try to keep himself in power despite losing reelection, that crime is now a sprawling nationwide scandal that has resulted in dozens of Republican officials, in almost all the swing states, being criminally charged, and in all of the prominent lawyers involved in that effort, either being criminally charged or having their licenses put at risk, or both.
And yes, Trump himself will be back in court tomorrow. And there’s stuff to know about that we’re going to we’re going to get to that tonight. But no matter what happens to him and his own felony cases and in his own political trajectory, do not lose sight of what is happening to the Republican Party. While they have been drafting off him in the lead, because it is an astonishing story on its own.