31 July 2019

Media Matters: What is Evan McMullin Doing To Muddle-In-The-Middle of Mitch McConnell's Motions To Change Election Laws?

The media got a new tag last week "Moscow Mitch" to hit on the Republican-controlled Speaker of the U.S. Senate in Congress, Mitch McConnell. He could get un-seated
Political divisions are getting deeper than ever with more name-calling per usual Washington power-ploys magnified more in the aftermath of Mueller's reluctant appearance in public. It's the latest rising firestorm to blow-up in the heat of the new 2020 election campaigns.
Republican Party loyalties are getting called into question and challenged. Mitch McConnell is vulnerable in Kentucky
Some people want to get back in the media spotlight - one of the talking-heads appearing is a guy from Utah who says he's trying to save democracy. . . or is it a new opportunity?
Perhaps like many others, Evan McMullin, a former CIA operative and failed Presidential candidate in 2018, might be on a new mission to unseat both the President and The Speaker of The Senate.
The features editor of The New Yorker published an interview in 2017 when Evan McMullin seemed to offer himself as a bipartisan symbol of opposition—and he was saying all the right things as "an unlikely civic superego for the Age of Trump".
(BLOGGER NOTE: Please scroll down farther to read extracts from David Haglund's piece)
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All the talking-points rolled-out in this Opinion Piece in The Washington Post
Mitch McConnell is a Russian asset
By Dana Milbank Op-ed columnist covering national politics Bio Follow  

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) attempted to move a bill that would require campaigns to report to the FBI contributions by foreign nationals.
>“I object,” said Hyde-Smith.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) tried to force action on bipartisan legislation, written with Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and supported by Sens. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.), protecting lawmakers from foreign cyberattacks. “The majority leader, our colleague from Kentucky, must stop blocking this common-sense legislation and allow this body to better defend itself against foreign hackers,” he said.
>“I object,” repeated Hyde-Smith.
The next day, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the minority leader, asked for the Senate to pass the Securing America’s Federal Elections Act, already passed by the House, that would direct $600 million in election assistance to states and require backup paper ballots.
McConnell himself responded this time, reading from a statement, his chin melting into his chest, his trademark thin smile on his lips. “It’s just a highly partisan bill from the same folks who spent two years hyping up a conspiracy theory about President Trump and Russia,” he said.
“Therefore, I object.”
McConnell also objected to another attempt by Blumenthal to pass his bill . . .
But McConnell has blocked all such attempts, including:
  • A bipartisan bill requiring Facebook, Google and other Internet companies to disclose purchasers of political ads, to identify foreign influence.
  • A bipartisan bill to ease cooperation between state election officials and federal intelligence agencies.
  • A bipartisan bill imposing sanctions on any entity that attacks a U.S. election.
  • A bipartisan bill with severe new sanctions on Russia for its cybercrimes.
> This year, National Intelligence Director Daniel Coats — Trump’s intelligence director — told the Senate Intelligence Committee that “foreign actors will view the 2020 U.S. elections as an opportunity to advance their interests. We expect them to refine their capabilities and add new tactics.” .  .
"But one man blocks it all — while offering no alternative of his own.
Presumably he thinks whatever influence Russia exerts over U.S. elections will benefit him (he's up for reelection in 2020) and his party.
. . . McConnell has no shame.

He is aiding and abetting Putin’s dismantling of Americans’ self-governance. A leader who won’t protect our country from attack is no patriot."
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TLDR > Too Long Didn't Read?? ....Try this
Why Is Mitch McConnell Blocking Bills To Protect U.S. Elections? | MSNBC
Published on Jul 26, 2019
Views: 362,204
Running time: 12:37
"Mitch McConnell ignores the warnings of Robert Mueller about the seriousness of Russian interference in our elections.
Evan McMullin and Michael Weiss explain why election security legislation is vital to the integrity of a free and fair election in 2020."

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In February 2017 Evan McMullin was "a person-of- interest" for David Haglund, the features editor of The New Yorker
Evan McMullin Is Trying to Save Democracy
"The former C.I.A. operative and failed Presidential candidate has become an unlikely civic superego for the age of Trump. McMullin seemed to offer himself as a bipartisan symbol of opposition—and he was saying all the right things.
SOME BACKGROUND:
"McMullin’s critique of Trump began quietly, when he was serving as the chief policy director for the House Republican Conference, in 2015.
Trump announced his candidacy that June, and right away, McMullin saw in Trump “telltale signs of authoritarianism,” he said. “Attacks on the press. Probably even before that, attacks on Hispanics and African-Americans. Those two things really concerned me.”
After Trump won the nomination, McMullin announced that he was running for President of the United States.
The bid was so quixotic that a handful of observers, some suspicious of McMullin’s C.I.A. background, wondered if someone was pulling the strings. “Who put him up?” Sean Hannity asked on his radio show in late October. “The Bush people? The Romney people?”
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BLOGGER NOTE: Let's pause a moment and observe that here in Mesa, contemporaneous almost in time, two conservative Mesa Mormon Republicans were caught on open mic during a public meeting here when Mesa Mayor John Giles encouraged AZ Senator Jeff Flake to also run for President as 'a foil', not knowing the microphone was open and saying that Trump is a fool . . .
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BLOGGER NOTE: This was the strategy and the outcome:
"At the time Hannity was asking these questions, the polls had tightened in Utah, where McMullin, who’s Mormon, had based his campaign, with an eye on the one, exceedingly unlikely path he had to the White House:
 If the race were close, and he prevailed in a single state, he might prevent Trump and Hillary Clinton from attaining an Electoral College majority. In that case, the House of Representatives would decide the next President, and, who knows, maybe they would settle on him. . . .
He didn’t finish higher than third in any state.
But by then Trump had publicly complained about “that guy in Utah,” and when Trump went on his “victory tour,” in December, he blasted “McMuffin” repeatedly, boosting McMullin’s stature.
For those who aren’t conspiracy-minded, this is the more plausible doubt to harbor about McMullin: that taking a stand was also a way of kickstarting his career.
“Frankly, I think that’s a good question,” he said, when I asked whether he was opportunistic."
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“And it goes back to my belief that influential institutions should have constant scrutiny. Well, so should people who seek to lead us.”
McMullin tends to talk this way, with an almost unrelenting high-mindedness.
He explained that the attention is simply a necessary vehicle for the work he’s trying to do:
> to encourage civic engagement
> to point out the early signs of authoritarianism
> and to demonstrate, by example, that it is still O.K. to vociferously criticize, and even to mock, our leaders."
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WHAT ELSE DID WE FIND OUT IN THE INTERVIEW?
> Stand Up Republic, a 501(c)4 nonprofit.
When we met, it was still in the planning stages. The goal, he said, “would be to engage people in defense of democracy and our Constitution, which means engaging with Congress and their leaders to advance things or to stop things, or whatever.”
> He said that they also wants to promote “truth and some democratic principles and you know, respect for the Constitution. I mean, broadly, I would think of it as digital media plus movement. Movement plus media.”
> . . . If McMullin’s lack of color was a handicap on the campaign trail—“When he talks about his personal story at rallies, it sounds mostly like a man quickly reciting his résumé,” a reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune wrote in late October—it seems, in the early days of the Trump Administration, to be part of his appeal.
"As the President unleashes his id on the American people, McMullin is a kind of civic superego, a Constitution-minded Jiminy Cricket.
> Listening to him speak about responsibility and fundamental principles, it was not hard to conjure his years as a Boy Scout and, later, a Mormon missionary.
> I thought I also detected a trace of that Mormon upbringing, which I share, in his sense of vocation, of being called to things
> McMullin grew up in a working-class family in Auburn, Washington, the oldest of four siblings.
> His father worked for Boeing and then a power company, while his mother sold bulk goods out of their garage. (She now oversees economic development efforts in Everett.)
> One night when McMullin was in junior high, his father rented the political thriller “Three Days of the Condor,” from 1975, which stars Robert Redford as a C.I.A. analyst and Faye Dunaway as the beautiful woman pulled into his effort to thwart a complicated plot hatched by rogue operatives.
> McMullin served a two-year Mormon mission in Brazil, then went to Brigham Young University, in Utah, where he minored in Middle Eastern studies.
He wrote a couple of papers about counterterrorism, and he “had this sense that terrorism was going to be a big issue for the country, going forward,”

> Meanwhile, he was accepted into a C.I.A. program for college students; every other semester, he worked at Langley.
“I had to pinch myself. It was amazing what they allowed me to do and the kind of access they gave me.
I mean, I was reading intercepts of all kinds of crazy things happening around the world.”
> What got him excited watching “Three Days of the Condor” was “seeing people committed to serving their country.”
The Redford character in that movie isn’t James Bond; he’s a low-level analyst who just happens to get caught up in something much bigger than himself.
> McMullin was at Langley on September 11, 2001. I asked what he was doing that morning. “It wasn’t anything flashy or C.I.A.-ish,” he said. “It was just—candidly, I was doing an Excel class.”
> Eventually, McMullin, who had studied Arabic for a year after college and then worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, in Jordan, served undercover in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia.
> “It’s not like I was going up to the local terror leader and saying, ‘Hey, I’d like to join your terror cell,’ ” he said. “It doesn’t work that way. Instead, you’re the spymaster, right? You’re recruiting and managing and directing a network of penetrations of terrorist groups and foreign governments, and you’re managing those people.”
> In 2009, McMullin went to business school at Wharton—“because one of my biggest professional deficiencies is that I had not acquired many analytical skills,” he explained.
>  Later, while working at Goldman Sachs in San Francisco, he volunteered for the Romney-Ryan Presidential campaign.
Like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, McMullin thinks
  • that the federal government is too large
  • if he were President, he “would seek to overturn Roe v. Wade,” he said.
  • He personally believes in “traditional marriage,” as he puts it, but he doesn’t think the government should make that decision for people.
> His parents divorced about a decade ago, and his mother, whom he called “one of the most amazing people I know on earth for a variety of reasons,” is now married to a woman. “Her partner, Michelle, is the kindest person you’ll ever meet,” he said.
When I asked if their relationship had informed his position on the issue, he said it hadn’t.
“I know there are a lot of politicians who—you know, they were opposed to gay marriage and then they find out their son’s gay and so then all of a sudden they’re changing their views.” He paused. “You know what, I’m not going to delegitimize or disrespect that. But I do think that there should be some principled view.”
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