2020 Election
Trump at Military Hospital; New Cases Among Allies Emerge
Published
6 years agoon
WASHINGTON (AP) — A feverish and fatigued President Donald Trump was spending the weekend at a military hospital for treatment of COVID-19, as new cases emerged among some of his top advisers and allies. Attention focused in particular on last Saturday’s White House event introducing Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, with several attendees announcing they had tested positive for the virus.
Among them: former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, the president of the University of Notre Dame, and at least two Republican lawmakers — Utah Sen. Mike Lee and North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis. Though the ceremony announcing Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination was held outdoors, attendees sat closely together and few wore masks. Some also mingled at a smaller event inside the White House.
The White House said Trump’s expected stay of “a few days” at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center was precautionary and he would continue to work from the hospital’s presidential suite, which is equipped to allow him to keep up his official duties. The White House physician said he was being treated with remdesivir, an antiviral medication, after taking another experimental drug at the White House.
The decision for the president to leave the White House for the hospital capped a day of whipsaw events in Washington Friday. The president, who has spent months playing down the threat of the virus, was forced to cancel all campaign events a month before the election as he fought a virus that has killed more than 205,000 Americans and is hitting others in his orbit as well.
Trump walked out of the White House on Friday evening wearing a mask and gave a thumbs-up to reporters but did not speak before boarding Marine One. Members of the aircrew, Secret Service agents and White House staff wore face coverings to protect themselves from the president onboard the helicopter.
In a video taped before leaving for Walter Reed, Trump said, “I think I’m doing very well, but we’re going to make sure that things work out.” He remained fully president, all authority intact.
“Going welI, I think! Thank you to all. LOVE!!!” he wrote in his first tweet from the hospital Friday night.
Trump first revealed that he had tested positive in a tweet about 1 a.m. Friday — hours after he returned from a Thursday afternoon political fundraiser. He had gone ahead to the event, saying nothing to the crowd though knowing he had been exposed to an aide with the disease that has infected millions in America and killed more than 1 million people worldwide.
First lady Melania Trump also tested positive and has said she has mild symptoms. She is believed to be isolating at the White House.
Also testing positive: Trump’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien. Campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said Stepien received a diagnosis Friday and is experiencing “mild flu-like symptoms.” Stepien, who joined Trump at Tuesday’s first presidential debate, plans to quarantine until he recovers. On Saturday, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin became the third Senate Republican to publicly confirm testing positive in the current spate of infections, although Johnson was not at last week’s Rose Garden event.
Trump’s diagnosis came during an already turbulent period in Washington and around the world, with the U.S. gripped in a heated presidential election and the pandemic taking a heavy human and economic toll. Trump’s immediate campaign events were all canceled, and his next debate with Democrat Joe Biden, scheduled for Oct. 15, is now in question.
Trump has been trying all year — and as recently as Wednesday — to convince the American public that the worst of the pandemic is past, and he has consistently played down concerns about being personally vulnerable. He has mostly refused to abide by basic public health guidelines — including those issued by his own administration — such as wearing face coverings in public and practicing social distancing. Until he tested positive, he continued to hold campaign rallies that drew thousands of often maskless supporters.
“I felt no vulnerability whatsoever,” he told reporters back in May. With the election coming up in a month, he is urging states and cities to “reopen” and reduce or eliminate shutdown rules despite continuing virus outbreaks.
The White House tried to maintain an atmosphere of business-as-usual on Friday.
“President Trump remains in good spirts, has mild symptoms, and has been working throughout the day,” said press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. “Out of an abundance of caution, and at the recommendation of his physician and medical experts, the president will be working from the presidential offices at Walter Reed for the next few days.”
The president’s physician said in a memo that Trump received a dose of an experimental antibody combination by Regeneron that is in clinical trials. Navy Commander Dr. Sean Conley said Trump “remains fatigued but in good spirits” and that a team of experts was evaluating both the president and first lady in regard to next steps.
Late Friday, Conley issued an update that said Trump is “doing very well” and is “not requiring any supplemental oxygen.” But he said that, “in consultation with specialists we have elected to initiate remdesivir therapy,” an antiviral medication.
“He has completed his first dose and is resting comfortably,” the doctor wrote.
The first lady, who is 50, has a “mild cough and headache,” Conley reported, and the remainder of the first family, including the Trumps’ son Barron, who lives at the White House, tested negative.
Trump is 74 years old and clinically obese, putting him at higher risk of serious complications from a virus that has infected more than 7 million people nationwide.
Both Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris have tested negative, their campaign said. Vice President Mike Pence tested negative for the virus Friday morning and “remains in good health,” his spokesman said. Pence was to resume his campaign schedule after his test.
Barrett, who was with Trump and many others on Saturday and has been on a Capitol Hill meeting with lawmakers, also tested negative, the White House said. It was confirmed that she had a mild case of COVID earlier this year and has now recovered.
Many White House and senior administration officials were undergoing tests,, but the full scale of the outbreak around the president may not be known for some time as it can take days for an infection to be detectable by a test. Officials with the White House Medical Unit were tracing the president’s contacts.
Trump’s handling of the pandemic has already been a flashpoint in his race against Biden, who spent much of the summer off the campaign trail and at his home in Delaware, citing concern about the virus. Biden has since resumed a more active campaign schedule, but with small, socially distanced crowds. He also regularly wears a mask in public, something Trump mocked him for at Tuesday night’s debate.
“I don’t wear masks like him,” Trump said. “Every time you see him, he’s got a mask. He could be speaking 200 feet away from me, and he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever seen.”
2020 Election
4th Resident of Retirement Haven Charged with Voter Fraud
Published
4 years agoon
January 6, 2022
THE VILLAGES, Fla. (AP) — A fourth resident of a massive Florida retirement community has been arrested on a charge of voter fraud.
Charles Barnes, 64, was arrested Tuesday and charged with voter fraud for casting more than one ballot, according to an arrest affidavit filed in court.
The arrest affidavit doesn’t detail the basis for the charge. Barnes entered a not guilty plea on Thursday.
His attorney, Victor Mead, didn’t immediately return an email inquiry.
Online voting records showed Barnes wasn’t affiliated with any political party and that he first registered to vote in Sumter County in 2019.
Barnes’ arrest was the fourth for voter fraud in the past two months of residents of The Villages retirement community in a county that is a Republican stronghold in Florida. Of the three other residents, two were registered Republicans and the third had no party affiliation.
The arrests come after Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis pledged to create a law enforcement agency to investigate election crimes, despite there being little evidence of electoral malfeasance by voters in the Sunshine State.
2020 Election
Florida House Public Integrity and Elections Committee Review 2020 Election Physical and Cybersecurity
Published
5 years agoon
February 10, 2021
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (FNN) – Many of the legislative committees are meeting in preparation for the upcoming legislative session on March 2, 2021.
The Public Integrity and Elections Committee met on February 9, 2021, to discuss whether or not Florida’s laws are working to produce secure, reliable, fair, and efficient elections. The presentations during this meeting were intended:
- Give the members of the committee an opportunity to learn more about the nuances of election law
- To appreciate what went right in the 2020 election
- To evaluate areas where there might be room for improvement
Secretary of State Laurel Lee talked about the physical and cybersecurity of the elections, with her main focus being on infrastructure.
On May 22, 2019, Governor Ron DeSantis instructed Secretary Lee to do a review of the statewide elections infrastructure to identify any vulnerabilities and address any vulnerabilities that were identified not only at the state level but across all 67 counties.
To create a baseline, the Department of State needed reliable information and the same information across all counties. The Department developed a plan along with the Supervisors of Elections from across the state. This plan involved sending Department of State cyber navigators to each of the 67 counties to conduct an election specific risk assessment on the individual networks.
This meant for the first time ever, the State Department had statewide visibility on the elections related systems, networks, and physical facilities. They were then able to send resources and personnel to the areas most in need and to work side-by-side with each county to address and mitigate any vulnerabilities.
Secretary Lee said that with the help of our federal partners, which included the US Attorney, FBI, and Homeland Security all critical intelligence and threat information was passed along in a timely manner and these partners helped in the fight against election-related misinformation.
Another new thing for this election was that the state joined the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) in order to enhance election security and maintain accurate voter rolls. Membership in ERIC allowed the state and the Supervisors of Elections to cross-check their rolls with those of all other member states to find deceased voters, duplicate registrations, or other list maintenance activities in order to maintain more accurate and up-to-date rolls.
The State Department also used ERIC to conduct the state’s most sweeping effort to date to register new voters. 2.2 billion postcards were sent out to potential voters. Within 10 days of the households starting to receive those postcards, the state saw 300,000 new registrations with a total of 14.4 million registered voters this year which is an increase of 1.4 million.
Secretary Lee applauded Judge Pete Antonacci, former Supervisor of Elections in Broward County for his and his team’s work on correcting the many problems plaguing Broward County elections. She said that in 2020, Broward County was truly a success story.
When asked by the committee about the breakdown in the online voter registration site this year and in past years, Secretary Lee said that her office had made improvements to the system but they were only expecting to handle 100,000’s of thousands of new registrations on the last night of registration but instead they had millions of voters trying to register. Her office immediately began to upgrade the system and she extended the deadline for another 24 hours, giving voters time to register online. Secretary Lee said that improvements have been made to the programming as well as the system capacity so that the online registration system now will be able to handle huge numbers of voters who may try to register online.
Judge Antonacci offered his observations to the committee from his time as Elections Supervisor. Judge Antonacci said that his biggest concern is with mail-in ballots. Broward County received 475,000 mail-in ballots over a 32-day period in the 2020 election. He said that verifying signatures is definitely an area that needs improvement. Antonacci also said that vote by mail request lists are available to certain political entities which makes ballot harvesting possible because these entities can now show up at a voter’s home and this should be addressed by the legislature.
Judge Antonacci also said that he was concerned about the people who came to the dropbox sites and deposited large numbers of mail-in ballots. He feels that there should be a limit to the number of ballots that are allowed to be dropped off by one person.
Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley disagreed with this observation by pointing out that because of the pandemic, many neighborhoods had one person designated to pick up all the mail-in ballots for the neighborhood and drop them off at a dropbox location. He also said that he knew of many families in his county that did the same thing.
The committee appeared to have their concerns and questions addressed. There were a few questions posed to Secretary Lee that she did not have the answer to but she promised to get those answers for the committee.
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Lynn DeJarnette is a reporter for Florida National News. | info@floridanationalnews.com
ORLANDO, Fla. – On January 6, 2021, the United States witnessed more history in the making. As United States representatives and senators went to work to confirm the electoral college votes for the duly elected President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, thousands of people showed up to persuade congress to overturn the election results. All of this overshadowed the historic victories of United States Senators-elect Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff of Georgia.
To be clear, this was not a protest, this was an insurrection put together with leaders of QAnon and white supremacist organizations such as the Proud Boys at the forefront. These were terrorists. After the insurrection died down, 66% of Republican House members voted to overturn the election results and eight Republican Senators – including Rick Scott of Florida – voted to overturn the election results. 147 Congressmen effectively voted in favor of terrorists. The worst part of this insurrection is that it was led by a powerful leader: President Donald J. Trump.
2020 broke many records, including the Black Lives Matter protests. Between 15 and 26 million protestors gathered, possibly becoming the largest protest in the history of the United States. Of the tens of thousands of BLM demonstrations that took place, 93% of them were entirely peaceful, meaning not one brick was thrown. However, the peaceful nature of BLM protestors did not stop law enforcement from using unnecessary force against them, it was common to see the use of rubber bullets and tear gas. In fact, President Trump condemned BLM protestors numerous times and even had peaceful protestors tear-gassed just so he could get a photo-op in front of St. John’s Church around Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C.
When far-right Trump supporters with confederate flags and Trump flags barreled into the United States Capitol breaking glass, assaulting officers, calling black officers racist slurs, erecting nooses, and breaking into congressional office buildings, the presence of officers were low. There was a large contrast between the officer response to peaceful BLM protests and the violent insurrection that got blood in the halls of the nations’ capitol. Instead of seeing violent arrests or racial profiling that occurs during BLM protests, people saw officers helping terrorists and members of guerilla movements walk down the stairs of the Capitol building and even take selfies with them.
Don’t be mistaken. This discrepancy between the response of law enforcement for left-leaning protests involving climate change or racial justice and right-leaning “protests” such as the so-called “Stop the Steal” protests and Wednesday’s violent riot are not completely unintentional. Over a decade ago, the FBI expressed concern about white supremacy in law enforcement, but those fears were not taken seriously by the U.S. government and over the past four years with a racist President Trump in office, law enforcement has only doubled down on racial bias.
For far too long, right-wingers have stood up for what they refer to as “blue lives” against the calls for reform and accountability in the law enforcement system to counteract efforts of social justice. The primarily white terrorists who launched the insurrection at the nations’ capitol were significantly more comfortable breaking glass and hurling insults at officers than BLM protestors were when they peacefully marched the streets. This comfort was caused by a sense of entitlement among right-wingers.
Since BLM protests first started, right-wingers flooded their social media pages with seven-point stars, placed thin blue hearts on their cars, and flew thin blue flags on their homes. This allegiance to police officers was viewed more as an alliance, so when the time came for them to start protesting, police officers would inevitably be on their side. Even when some officers retaliated against these terrorists, it was met with shock and anger.
If the pandemic didn’t get citizens thinking about how developed the U.S. is, this insurrection certainly should. The United States is supposedly one of the wealthiest and most developed countries, but the wealth inequality is high, right-wing demagoguery is on the rise, and more evidence is pointing to the idea that members of the Capitol Police colluded with terrorists to possibly harm members of Congress along with their staff. The U.S.’s status as a developed democracy is at risk, but it could be fixed.
The members of Congress who constantly voted to appease this dangerous president over the past four years and the members who chose to vote against certifying the results of a democratically held election must be held accountable. This means removing them from committees and even expelling those members, including Senator Rick Scott. The U.S. should also do more to hold law enforcement officers accountable and make them follow the same laws that ordinary citizens follow by getting rid of qualified immunity. There must be a stronger movement to shift funding to mental health resources in local communities to counter this large increase in white supremacy in law enforcement.
Democracy is at risk and the United States must do everything it takes to protect it from the same people who damaged it by placing this dangerous and corrupt administration at the top.
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Nathaniel Douglas is a newly elected Supervisor on the Orange Soil & Water Conservation District Board, making history as the youngest to ever be elected to that board, and was the youngest to be elected to public office in the state of Florida during the 2020 election. He is a Florida National News political contributor. | info@floridanationalnews.com
