"What's GOP Lawyers Group Up To?" (Preparing for Voter Intimidation and Recount Shenanigans?)

[KoKo]

TPM Editors Blog
What's GOP Lawyers Group Up To?
David Kurtz | October 18, 2010, 9:22PM

Richard DeVos Sr.

When Richard DeVos, the Michigan billionaire who founded Amway and is a generous contributor to Republican causes, gives $150,000 to the Republican National Lawyers Association just a few weeks before the midterm elections, it makes you sit up and take notice. In the realm of political giving, $150,000 isn't that much money, but the RNLA doesn't buy TV ads, it has barely a handful of full-time staffers, and its overall budget is relatively modest. So what does the RNLA do and what did DeVos figure he'd be supporting with that money?

The RNLA is the leading independent entity on the right devoted to preparing Republican attorneys for election day and post-election lawyering. But it's also part of the right wing's bogus voter fraud noise machine, whipping up hysteria over the idea that elections are being stolen because of alleged but unproven monkeying with minority votes. For instance, last year RNLA paid a DC lawyer named Chris Berg tens of thousands of dollars for "research and investigation" and launched a program called "ACORN Watch." Berg, who did a series of blog posts for the RNLA blog on ACORN, also posts on Andrew Breitbart's Big Government website, whose doctored footage of the ACORN sting launched the "scandal."

One of the speakers at RNLA events is J. Christian Adams, the apparatchik from the Bush Justice Department who has tried to turn the Obama Justice Department's handling of voter intimidation charges against the New Black Panthers into a cause celebre among conservatives, with some success. (Ever resourceful, the RNLA has used the Black Panthers case as a fund-raising tool.) Another Bush-era voting fraud huckster, Hans von Spakovsky, was scheduled to appear last week at an RNLA panel in DC.

But here's where the RNLA's activity gets interesting and what may make the timing of DeVos' $150,000 notable. As Ryan Reilly has been reporting for us at TPMmuckraker, the RNLA is currently in the midst of conducting what it bills as an "unprecedented" series of election law training seminars in the run up to the midterms elections. The seminars have been held or scheduled in several states, including Illinois, Nevada, Florida, Washington, California and New York.

---snip---

But there's more.

Tonight's seminar in Chicago is one of several RNLA seminars in Illinois in the weeks before the election. They come at the same time that the GOP nominee for Senate from Illinois, Rep. Mark Kirk, was caught on tape on a GOP conference call touting the "voter integrity" squads his campaign will use to target minority precincts around the state. The effort is being organized in part by the Illinois Republican Party (which uses the term "ballot integrity" program.) Targeting black neighborhoods with teams of Republican lawyers and observers evokes the sort of intimidation of African American voters that has a long and dark history. The Justice Department is monitoring the situation in Illinois, TPM has learned.

Worth the Read at.........
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/10/whats_the_rnla_up_to.php#more?ref=fpblg

[Scuba]

1. Part of their overall strategy to steal the election: claim the other guy is doing it.

[KoKo]

2. DU "Voting Rights" peoples need to see this. I'm thinking 2000 "Selection?"

If there are any Oldie DU'er's still around....you know what this means!