Name: Sidney Powell’s latest Michigan lawsuit cites a witness claiming fraud -- in county that doesn’t exist
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Sidney Powell’s latest Michigan lawsuit cites a witness claiming fraud -- in county that doesn’t exist

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--Report typos and corrections to: .The far right is rallying behind former Otero County Commissioner Couy Griffin following his court-ordered removal from his commission seat last week.Griffin remained unrepentant, telling a far-right radio host that the judge who ordered him off the board had no authority to do so, and suggesting that shadowy forces barred him from office in order to further supposed election fraud in the state.Griffin was removed from office by order of Judge Francis Mathew on Tuesday, Sept. 6. Mathew ruled that Griffin violated the 14th Amendment by participating in the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.The attack constituted an attempt at insurrection, making Griffin ineligible to ever serve in office in the United States, Mathew ruled. The rule, originally intended to bar Confederates from office after the Civil War, had not been used in.Mathew ruled that Griffin’s removal from office is effective retroactively since the day of the riot, meaning any votes Griffin took as a county commissioner since then are invalid. Otero County Attorney R.B. Nichols told the board Thursday that he will review all the votes since Jan. 6, 2021, to determine if Griffin cast a deciding vote in any of them.“We may need to revisit those votes,” Nichols told the commission. “It’s kind of uncharted territory.” In figuring it out, they’ll “hopefully get some input from some other attorneys, their thoughts on what it means for the county,” he said.Griffin was convicted of entering and remaining in a restricted area during the attack on the Capitol and in June by Trump-appointed Judge Trevor McFadden. Griffin had already spent more than 14 days in jail awaiting trial, so McFadden did not order additional jail time.Immediately following his sentencing in Washington, D.C., Griffin called into the Otero County Commission and from the New Mexico Supreme Court ordering him and other commissioners to certify the results of the 2022 primary election.Griffin’s case was taken up on messaging app Telegram by, who posted contact information for Mathew and encouraged their followers to call and email him. Officials targeted by the Clements have often reported a wave of harassment and threats stemming from their attacks.Erin Clements also uploaded a complaint that she told her followers she had filed against the judge and encouraged them to file similar complaints. Judge Mathew “committed a gross overstepping of his power as a state district judge by daring to attempt to remove a duly elected official, Mr. Couy Griffin, based on his own personal political vitriol and personal feelings about the conservative half of the country,” Clements wrote in the complaint.Clements also posted a letter she wrote to the remaining commissioners, Nichols and Otero County Sheriff David Black, urging them to defy Judge Mathew’s order.“I understand that Sheriff Black and Roy Nichols are both assisting in carrying out this unconstitutional, disgusting order which works directly against the civil rights of the citizens of Otero County,” she wrote. They should have recused themselves, she continued, in anticipation of an appeal and because the order is unconstitutional.“They would have been within their rights to let this out-of-county judge figure out how to enforce his own order,” she wrote. “I hope you will all consider that by submitting to this out-of-district judge’s insane order, that you are giving him power he doesn’t have and setting a dangerous and disgusting precedent.”She urged her followers to send similar letters to the sheriff and the other officials.In an email response to Source NM, Clements challenged the legality of Mathew’s order. By “backdating what is an illegal removal in the first place, the judge took away the fundamental right of 20,000 citizens from Mr. Griffin’s district to have representation in their county government,” she wrote.Nikhel Sus, senior counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), said the decision to invalidate Griffin’s votes since Jan. 6, 2021, is based on cut-and-dry precedent from the New Mexico Supreme Court. CREW was one of the organizations that represented plaintiffs in the lawsuit seeking to remove Griffin from office.“The case law in New Mexico makes clear that the date you forfeit office, if you’re a disqualified office holder, is the date the disqualifying condition occurs,” Sus said. “That is not a point that Mr. Griffin disputed at trial.”failed in September 2021, but that’s irrelevant, Sus said.“Mr. Griffin’s argument appears to be that because the people didn’t remove him from a recall election, that he can hold office even if he’s legally disqualified from serving, and that’s just not how the law works,” he said. “That disqualification is part of the United States Constitution and is completely separate from his removability through a recall election.”In a video posted to Telegram Thursday, David Clements called Judge Mathew’s decision “tyranny” and vowed to assist Griffin in finding a lawyer to file an appeal. In response, commenters on Clements’ channel called for Judge Mathew to be jailed, and one suggested Griffin should sue the judge for defamation.Griffin appeared alongside Erin Clements Thursday on election denier Joe Oltmann’s podcast, telling the host that the judge did not have the right to order him removed from office. “He doesn’t have jurisdiction in this deal, man… it’s been very hard to stomach,” Griffin said.Oltmann repeatedly called Judge Mathew a “Nazi,” and added “I’m not going to apologize” for the comment. He urged Griffin to lock himself in his office at the Otero County Commission and refuse to leave.“There’s no precedent that would allow a judge to remove a sitting elected official. But that didn’t stop this Nazi judge from breaking the law,” Oltmann said.Griffin vowed to file an appeal and doubled down on his earlier accusations of election fraud, falsely claiming that fraud had been proven in this year’s Otero County primary election and insisting he was right not to certify the results.He also insinuated without evidence that Judge Mathew’s order was part of a conspiracy to enable wide-scale voter fraud in Otero County.Oltmann encouraged listeners to donate to a crowdfunding page set up to fund a legal appeal for Griffin. By the end of the weekend, the page had raised nearly $10,000.“I had an agenda item on the agenda today to call a public hearing to pass an ordinance against the ballot dropboxes,” Griffin said. “So that was my next move, was to draft an ordinance against ballot drop boxes in Otero County, and all of a sudden I’m removed from office two days before the meeting. You know, coincidence.”He went on to say that his opponents will spend their lives in federal prison after “the truth comes out” about “the Biden laptop thing.” He did not elaborate further on what he meant by “the truth.”Mathew did not respond to an emailed request for comment. Griffin could not be reached for comment for this story. Oltmann and David Clements did not respond to an email asking for comment.Conservative media more broadly also rallied behind Griffin, with Breitbart that Griffin “apparently believed he was defending the Constitution, not rebelling against it,” while the Daily Caller claimed in a headline that “Walking Around Outside The Capitol Is Now Officially ‘Insurrection,’ Says Judge.” other conservative and right-wing outlets including the Gateway Pundit and RedState also defended Griffin following Mathew’s ruling.is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Source New Mexico maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Marisa Demarco for questions: . Follow Source New Mexico on and .MIAMI — Republican politics may be about to get a lot more churchy than they already are. On Monday, the second day of the here, conference organizer Yoram Hazony, chair of the Edmund Burke Foundation, called on conservatives, repeatedly, to "repent." This chastisement was focused in large part on what Hazony — also the author of "The Virtue of Nationalism" and the recent "Conservatism: A Rediscovery" — considers excessive squeamishness on the political right to discuss what he sees as the Christian roots of the United States. This might come as a surprise to many Americans who have watched the increasingly overt and forceful alliance between the Republican far right and Christian nationalism. But Hazony envisions something on a broader societal level: the restoration of Christianity as the "" of America, meaning that Christian values and observances are assumed to reflect the will of the majority, and while non-Christians should not face active discrimination they also should not expect to see their values reflected in the public square. Hazony himself is Jewish, but has argued for the past several years that only such a restoration of public Christianity — through things like a return to Bible instruction in public schools — can stave off the threat of "woke neo-Marxism." Toward that end, he argued, Republicans need to be even more explicit than they already are."When politicians come and stand on this stage," he asked, "do they mention the Bible? No, never." He continued, seeming to directly reference a quote from the speech that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had delivered on the opening night of the conference: "Do they mention God? Yes, yes they do. They'll always say the same thing: 'Well, our rights come from God, not government.' OK, fair enough. Can you tell me, when did God give you those rights?" There was an answer to that question, he continued: "We got these rights from God in the Bible." An hour later, when Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley took to the stage, he eagerly obliged, delivering a speech that might as well have been a sermon. In 2021, when Hawley last spoke at NatCon, he drew nationwide for his declaration that "the Left" sought to "unmake manhood" and create "a world beyond men," and widespread mockery for his contention that feminist critiques of masculinity had led to a generation of young men addicted to video games and pornography. This year, Hawley said, he was focused on the left's "efforts to unmake history." But after the standard conservative reference to 1776 and the contention that "the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God," Hawley went a step further, saying that notion "comes from the Bible" and that, in fact, America's founding had only been possible because of the Bible. "We are a revolutionary nation precisely because we are the heirs of the revolution of the Bible," Hawley said, in a clear response to Hazony's challenge that was echoed by other speakers throughout the day. "This was a revolution that began with the founding of the nation of Israel at Sinai and continued with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth in the days of ancient Rome." "Without the Bible, there is no modernity. Without the Bible, there is no America," Hawley claimed. "And now our biblical inheritance is again at the center of our politics. It is the question of the age." The "woke left's" campaign to "remake" the country, he continued — from the "1619 Project" to trans rights — was actually targeting "the inheritance of the Bible." "What they particularly dislike about America is our dependence on biblical teaching and tradition," Hawley said. "What they particularly dislike about our culture is the Bible. And now they want to break that influence for good." Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? , Crash Course. If the tone of that speech seems unusual for a U.S. senator, it fit in at NatCon, which included other talks with titles like "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Christian Nationalism," "How Christian Conservatives Beat the UN and How You Can, Too," "A Christian Case for an 'America First' Government," and four separate panels considering the respective roles of both the Protestant and Catholic versions of faith within the movement. On Tuesday morning, Daily Wire media host Michael Knowles delivered a plenary address making the case that "the traditional definition of the United States" is inarguably "Christian nationalism." Hawley went on to speak at length about scripture, invoking biblical stories of Abraham and Jesus, and told a story about early Christians in the Roman empire who drove an axe into the head of a statue of a "pagan" god, supposedly leading to "thousands of rats…surging out of the rotten insides." That, he continued, was akin to NatCon's political enemies today."The woke left, they seem powerful, and maybe they are," Hawley concluded. "Opposing them might cost us much, but the truth is worth any cost." Invoking the biblical through-line that, "though the God of the universe could have accomplished his purposes entirely on his own, he chose instead to call us to do his work with him," Hawley exhorted the audience to "count the cost and take our stand, and we will turn the tide."&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Copyright © 2022 Raw Story Media, Inc. PO Box 21050, Washington, D.C. 20009 | | | For corrections or concerns, please email corrections@rawstory.com. | {{ post.roar_specific_data.api_data.analytics }}

--Report typos and corrections to: .The far right is rallying behind former Otero County Commissioner Couy Griffin following his court-ordered removal from his commission seat last week.Griffin remained unrepentant, telling a far-right radio host that the judge who ordered him off the board had no authority to do so, and suggesting that shadowy forces barred him from office in order to further supposed election fraud in the state.Griffin was removed from office by order of Judge Francis Mathew on Tuesday, Sept. 6. Mathew ruled that Griffin violated the 14th Amendment by participating in the...

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Sidney Powell’s latest Michigan lawsuit cites a witness claiming fraud -- in county that doesn’t exist

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