This piece was originally published in the November 17, 2020 edition of CAP Action’s daily newsletter, the Progress Report. Subscribe to the Progress Report here.
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— Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of a social media company that has allowed dozens of Trump’s posts containing false election information to reach millions of people in the days around the election
11,000,000+ cases. 246,000+ dead.
Trump and McConnell have spent 186 days blocking the House-passed COVID relief bill. It didn’t have to be this way.
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IN THE NEWS
- No one knows exactly what the next few months will look like, but one thing is certain: Lindsey Graham will always come to Trump’s defense. As Trump continues exhausting every opportunity to challenge the results of a perfectly legitimate election, Graham is following suit. Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger said this week that Graham — who represents South Carolina in the Senate — called him and asked about the possibility of invalidating certain types of absentee ballots in Georgia.
- According to Raffensberger, Graham asked him to “look hard and see how many ballots you could throw out.” And while Graham has brushed off the accusation and characterized it as part of his duties as a U.S. senator (it’s not), another Georgia official who was on the call confirmed the Secretary of State’s account that Graham’s inquiry did, in fact, involve whether the state could throw out entire counties worth of ballots with high rates of signature mismatch. What Graham is suggesting here — tossing out legally cast ballots — is against the law, according to government ethics experts.
- Today, Graham tried to cover his bases by telling reporters he’d done this in a number of states. Arizona’s Secretary of State says she hasn’t been contacted by Graham. It’s unclear if Graham was just trying to target Georgia with his corrupt probing of other states’ election procedures and if so, what he expected to accomplish. Even if Biden had lost Georgia (which he very much did not), he still would’ve won both the popular vote and the Electoral College.
- Trump’s reckless posts that include false information about the election results underscore the need for a stronger crackdown on disinformation. In the week after the election, Trump’s lie-filled Facebook posts accounted for ALL of the top 10 most engaged-with posts on the site, based on data from CrowdTangle.
We’ll break down the latest Facebook news and more in tomorrow’s edition of What’s Trending?. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox in the morning.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- The leaders of prominent medical groups wrote to the Trump administration today to urge them to begin the official transition process in order to “save countless lives.” In the letter, the CEOs of the American Hospital Association, American Medical Association, and American Nurses Association emphasized the importance of a smooth transition to the Biden administration to ensure Biden’s team has access to critical data needed to hit the ground running and work to control the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Congresswoman-elect Cori Bush (D-MO) said that some of her future Republican colleagues mistakenly referred to her as “Breonna” when she wore a mask bearing Breonna Taylor’s name. As most of America knows by now, Breonna Taylor was a 26-year-old EMT who was shot and killed by police in her Louisville, Kentucky home in March. Her name has been invoked in countless rallying cries and at demonstrations against police violence since her death, and the state’s Attorney General has faced national scrutiny for his mishandling of the case.
- Bush said she was hurt and stunned that people who will soon serve alongside her in Congress didn’t recognize Taylor’s name. In an interview with CNN yesterday, she stressed that elected officials “have to know what is happening in…not only our communities, but what’s happening in other communities.”
- Remember the news yesterday about a second, potentially promising COVID-19 vaccine? You can thank Dolly Parton for that. Dolly reportedly donated $1 million to a research center that helped develop the Moderna vaccine, which has shown in trials to be nearly 95% effective. A true national hero.
WHAT WE’RE READING
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