Where Things Stand: Walker Talks An Awful Lot About ‘Redemption’ For Someone Who Doesn’t Need Saving

Herschel Walker released a new campaign ad this afternoon, two days into his latest scandal’s news cycle. And for someone who’s denied the paid-abortion allegations in the “strongest possible terms,” the born-again Christian talk is really muddying that story.

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Wow

This is quite a statement in Walker’s defense from many vantage points.

Newt Gingrich: “I think he is the most important Senate candidate in the country because he’ll do more to change the Senate just by the sheer presence, by his confidence, by his deep commitment to Christ,” Gingrich said. “You know, he’s been through a long, tough period. He suffered a lot of concussions coming out of football.”

Herschel Walker And GOP Scramble To Do Major Damage Control After Explosive Paid Abortion Allegation

On Monday, the Daily Beast dropped a bombshell report in which an ex-girlfriend of Georgia Republican Senate nominee Herschel Walker revealed that the supposedly “pro-life” candidate had paid for her to get an abortion in 2009. The woman backed up her account with a receipt from the abortion clinic, a bank deposit receipt from a signed $700 check Walker had given her for the procedure, and even a “get well” card he had allegedly sent her that bore his signature.

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Crystal Ball Remains Cloudy

My friend Steve Clemons, now of Semafor, says that RNC officials believe the Dobbs backlash is fading and popular concern is refocusing on inflation and economic woes. That’s one strain of argument we’ve heard a lot recently and it’s what you’d expect people at the RNC to say. But it’s also potentially in line with recent polling which has showed some ebb of the Democratic momentum which started in the aftermath of Dobbs and accelerated with declining gas prices.

Meanwhile, today OPEC+ — led by Saudi Arabia — announced a substantial lowering of production which seems certain to spike gas prices. The White House had been pulling out all the stops trying to prevent that, unsuccessfully. File that away in your folder of whether Saudi Arabia is an ally of the United States or of the GOP.

All this said, the actual picture on the ground seems muddled.

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11th Circuit Gives DOJ Most Of What It Asked For In Expediting MAL Appeal

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed on Wednesday to a request from the DOJ to speed up the government’s bid to block a Trump-friendly judge’s intervention in the Mar-a-Lago investigation.

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New Details Emerge About *Another* Election Security Breach In Michigan

Last October, we learned that the “brains” of a voting machine in Adams Township, Michigan had gone missing. Now we know a little more about what happened to it.

The scan unit tablet, which hosts sensitive election data and vendor software, went missing shortly after Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson banned Adams Township Clerk Stephanie Scott from overseeing municipal elections. Scott had allegedly refused to run accuracy tests on the voting machine due to unfounded fears that it would erase 2020 election data.

Reuters reported this week that the equipment was found by the state police locked away in a cabinet in Scott’s office.

Scott was also reportedly involved in a second election security breach. According to Reuters, the Republican clerk had handed confidential voter data to an information-technology expert named Benjamin Cotton.

Cotton appears to be a recurring contact for multiple people involved in breaches: In a sworn statement for an Arizona lawsuit, he said that he’d examined election systems in Coffee County, Georgia, and Mesa County, Colorado — the sites of two high-profile election breaches over the past year.

Scott’s lawyer Stefanie Lambert Junttila disclosed the second breach in an affidavit back in July, though it was first reported by Reuters this week. Junttila is another regular in the coordinated national attack on election security: Trump lawyer Sidney Powell enlisted the Michigan attorney as part of her “Kraken” team to verify the debunked claim that the 2020 election was rigged against the former president. 

As Scott’s legal representative, Junttila cast Cotton as an expert who analyzed the township’s voting data for irregularities. That data was pulled from the township’s electronic pollbook, which holds confidential information such as voters’ drivers licenses and birthdays. Scott admitted to handing the data to Cotton in a board meeting on August 8th, Reuters reported, citing a video it obtained.

Junttila later claimed on a conservative podcast that Cotton had found “strong circumstantial evidence” of a rigged election, but Hillsdale County clerk Marney Kast, who replaced Scott, denied the claim. “I am not sure what records Mr. Cotton was looking at,” she said, but the number of voters matched the number of names in the pollbook.

Scott and Cotton are being investigated by a special prosecutor in Michigan for their alleged attempts to gain unauthorized access to the equipment, alongside nine other people, Reuters reported.

In a June email obtained by the outlet, a detective recommended that the state’s attorney general consider unspecified charges against Scott for her role in one of the breaches.

The breaches fit into a growing pattern of threats to election integrity from poll workers nationwide. Michigan is one of a few states that has seen a spate of such incidents. Last week, for example, another Michigan man inserted his own personal USB drive into an electronic poll book in Kent County. He’s since been charged with two felonies. 

Musings and Big Pictures

From TPM Reader JS

I think you’re spot on that climate is the underlying stressor. Since we live in such a complex society, it’s usually hard to see down to the fundamentals how easy it is to disturb. Covid showed that just a few failures can rapidly spread. We’re never that far away from a collapse.

But what impressed me about a book I recently read about the collapse of Sub-Roman Britain was a phrase the author repeated, and I’m not sure it’s his, anyway, it was “the four horseman ride together.” In other words, some natural disasters happens, say, a famine, and then disease results, then war, and so on. I’m struck that, apparently, one day, the government just stopped sending bullion to back coins, and a warlord took almost the entire army to Gaul to where they had a mint to get the soldiers their pay and just never went back. 

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Herschel Walker’s Team Bet That Paid Abortion Story Wouldn’t Come Out. Oops.

Ex-NFL star and Georgia Republican Senate nominee Herschel Walker’s allies reportedly were really, really hoping this day wouldn’t come.

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