Stop The (Trump) Steal!

• President Trump has ratcheted up his efforts to steal victory from an election he decisively lost. After losing in court over and over again, he has set his sights on strong-arming state Republican lawmakers to appoint electors who would overrule the will of voters in states Trump lost.
• On Thursday, news broke that Trump had reached out to GOP members of Michigan’s Wayne County Board of Canvassers before they attempted to backtrack on their votes to certify the county’s election results.
• The Michigan secretary of state’s office told TPM there is “no legal mechanism” for the GOP members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers to rescind their votes.
• But Trump is not giving up on his clown show coup. He invited Michigan’s top Republican lawmakers to visit the White House on Friday.
• White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters Friday that the confab “is not an advocacy meeting” and that no one from the campaign will be present.
• It should come as no surprise that a dripping Rudy Giuliani delivered the most baffling and bizarre political moment of the week. At a press conference Thursday at RNC headquarters in Washington, Giuliani floated some truly wild conspiracy theories.
• Chris Krebs, the DHS election security official Trump unceremoniously fired on Twitter, summed up the Giuliani spectacle pretty well: “That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history. And possibly the craziest.”

Sex, Lies, And Regret

• TPM’s Josh Kovensky published an exclusive story this week detailing Giancarlo Granda’s long and complicated history with the Falwells: “Across days of in-person interviews outside Washington D.C., over weeks of phone calls, and through dozens of supporting documents, Granda provided TPM with the most detailed account yet of his entanglement with the Falwells, which would contribute to Jerry losing his position as president of Liberty University and leave Granda feeling besieged by embarrassing articles, wanting to change his name.”
• Because we know you’re busy, you can dig into the key takeaways from the story here. But make time for the full story if you can. A lot of work and collective effort went into the piece.

Why Trump May Not Be Able To Rig Census

• Issues in the data of the 2020 census will delay the release of apportionment data until after President Trump leaves office, TPM’s Tierney Sneed first reported on Thursday.
• The issues in the data are standard and this sort of thing is routine, according to a source, but it means Joe Biden will be President when the Census Bureau hands him the data that will be transmitted to Congress to determine House seats for the next decade.
• Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee, which has oversight over the census, wrote in a letter Thursday that the Census Bureau is refusing to brief her committee on the data issues that have arisen.
• “Unfortunately, the Committee was not informed about these anomalies before they
  became public,” Maloney wrote. “To the contrary, the Census Bureau cancelled several weekly staff briefings on the status of the 2020 Census over the past month. In addition, when Committee staff requested a briefing earlier today about these new developments, they were refused.”

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