Mike Johnson Cites Bogus Data to Support His Voting Conspiracy Law

House Speaker Mike Johnson relied on some flimsy facts to back the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, Act, to make it harder for noncitizens to vote in the U.S. elections, something that is of course, already illegal.

The bill, which would require a Real ID or U.S. passport for voting rather than the standard driver’s license, passed the Republican-led House Wednesday, but it was built on a false premise and backed by baseless claims.

To attract support for the bill, Johnson circulated a white paper that included some claims about voting by undocumented immigrants—that aren’t backed up by any evidence, according to the Ohio Capital Journal.

In one section, Johnson’s handout referred to Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who had ordered 137 noncitizens to be removed from the state’s voter rolls. But LaRose has yet to provide any actual evidence of illegally cast ballots.

LaRose even acknowledged in a May press release that some of those people could’ve been included as “the result of an honest mistake.”

“These may be well-meaning people trying to pursue the American dream, and communication barriers sometimes result in a registration form being submitted in error,” LaRose said. “We need to help them get that cleared up before an accidental registration becomes an illegal vote that could result in a felony conviction or even deportation.”

Under federal law, the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles is required to offer voter registration forms to state residents seeking any service. As a result, some forms are filled out by noncitizens, who even mark themselves as ineligible to vote, but the forms are still processed anyway. Another possible explanation is that those voters have been naturalized but have yet to visit the BMV to officially change their status.

If the evidence isn’t really adding up, there’s a good reason for that: Noncitizens don’t really vote in state or federal elections. In 2016, noncitizen votes accounted for just 0.0001 percent of the votes cast, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Noncitizen voting is a right-wing conspiracy, though, and in reality, the only ones concocting a scheme to fake votes in the last election were in Donald Trump’s camp.

The SAVE Act is ultimately doomed to fail, but that may be by design. It will never pass the Democratic-led Senate, and President Joe Biden has already promised to veto it. But its failure sets the stage for Republicans to run rampant with claims of widespread voter fraud in the upcoming election, even though the numbers don’t support it.

In his latest desperate move to avoid being held to account, Donald Trump is arguing that evidence used to convict him for setting up hush money payments ahead of the 2016 election should be dismissed and his 34-count felony conviction should be vacated based on the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that significantly expanded presidential immunity.

“Because of the implications for the institution of the Presidency, the use of official-acts evidence was a structural error under the federal Constitution that tainted the District Attorney’s grand jury proceedings as well as the trial,” defense lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove wrote in a motion filed on Thursday. “The jury’s verdicts must be vacated.”

The motion was filed on Thursday, the same day Trump was initially scheduled to be sentenced for his felony convictions. Trump’s lawyers pointed to two pieces of evidence—Hope Hicks’s testimony of conversations she had with Trump while he was in office and posts he made on Twitter while he was president—arguing both constituted official actions. The Supreme Court’s ruling doesn’t entirely define what constitutes an official action, but in his lawsuit that came before the Supreme Court, Trump had argued for absolute immunity on the basis that anything a president does is inherently an official act. It’s unclear if the Supreme Court’s ruling is retroactively applicable or if it applies to evidence brought in state-level cases, as it focused on the federal case brought by special counsel Jack Smith in relation to Trump’s fake electors scheme. While some evidence in Trump’s hush-money trial occurred during his presidency, the trial focused on actions Trump took when he was still a candidate, not president.

Whether removing Hicks’s testimony and Trump’s Twitter posts will be discounted as evidence, and whether that change is enough to throw the case is up to the judge. Last week, Judge Juan Merchan agreed to delay Trump’s sentencing to September 18 to review the Supreme Court’s ruling and its impact on the case.

Donald Trump was quick to pounce on one of President Joe Biden’s verbal flubs late Thursday, leveraging a glaring mistake to his advantage.

Moments after finishing his scripted speech, Biden mistakenly referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump,” shocking the crowd of reporters as well as some of his Cabinet members in attendance.

“Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president [inaudible] think she was not qualified to be president, so let’s start there,” Biden said.

Moments later, Trump was resharing a clip of the slipup to his Truth Social page, mocking the president’s inability to keep his characters and facts straight.

“Crooked Joe begins his ‘Big Boy’ Press Conference with, ‘I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president, though I think she was not qualified to be president,’” Trump wrote, intentionally misquoting what Biden said. “Great job, Joe!”

Trump also took advantage of several other verbal lapses Biden had while responding to members of the White House press corps Thursday evening, including a moment when he stumbled over referring to his chief of staff of the military, and when he slurred the words “intelligence community” and “declassified.”

The easy punches from Biden’s opponent follow a NATO summit in which diplomats and world leaders watched and worried over Biden’s mental fitness, and his subsequent ability to win over the American public and maintain the threatened international alliance. Meanwhile, back at home, Democratic lawmakers are weighing whether to formally rescind their endorsement from Biden as their presumptive presidential nominee.

Even within Biden’s campaign, staffers are reportedly looking for other options: On Thursday, a leaked report revealed that the campaign was quietly polling voters on Harris’s odds, should she take the top of the ticket in a direct match-off against Trump. The leaked poll didn’t include its results, but other polls assessing Harris’s viability have indicated that she would have a slight advantage over Biden.

Former Donald Trump supporters will be featured on multiple billboards near the Milwaukee arena where the Republican National Convention will take place next week, with a simple message for the former president: I won’t vote for you.

The billboards are the handiwork of Republican Voters Against Trump, which has placed similar billboards around the city, sporting simple slogans like, “I won’t vote for a convicted felon.” The project, which has produced 15 billboards and one 60-second ad spot that will run in four swing states, is being funded by the Republican Accountability PAC, and targets moderate Republicans and right-leaning voters in key battlegrounds.

Scott Moore, a 63-year-old Army veteran from Nashville, Tennessee, is one of the former Trump backers whose face will be blown up and featured on the massive signs.

“I always thought a businessman could shake up the good ol’ boy system. I wasn’t thrilled about him, but I thought he was a successful businessman,” Moore told the Tennessee Lookout. He’d voted for Trump in 2016.

But later, he explained, “I saw that what he was doing was about him and not about our country.”

An estimated 2,429 delegates will attend the RNC, which begins Monday in Milwaukee, where they are expected to formally confirm Trump as the Republican Party’s nominee for president. Of those delegates, several are the very same fake electors alleged to have aided Trump’s scheme to overturn the election results in 2020.

To secure the party’s nomination, Trump must clinch 1,215 delegates. This seems likely, as he received 2,243 in the primaries, and former presidential candidate Nikki Haley released her 97 delegates this week, directing them to back Trump’s nomination.

President Joe Biden on Thursday ended a defiant press conference with a strange qualifier on his personal commitment to staying in the presidential race.

When asked directly whether he would consider withdrawing if polling numbers indicated Vice President Kamala Harris would fare better in a matchup against Donald Trump, the 81-year-old president said no, with one caveat.

“You earlier explained confidence in your vice president. If your team came back and showed you data that she would fare better against former President Donald Trump, would you reconsider your decision to stay in the race?” a Scripps reporter asked.

“No, unless they came back and said, ‘There’s no way you can win,’” Biden said, adding “… me.”

“And no one’s saying that. No polls are saying that,” he added in a whisper, launching the room filled with the White House press corps into chaos. It was the last question of one of the most critical evenings of Biden’s presidency, as Democratic lawmakers weigh whether to formally strip their endorsement from Biden as their presumptive presidential nominee.

Despite Biden’s insistence, national polls have shown Harris faring as well or better than him in a direct matchup against Trump in November.

Following a two-hour delay to the beginning of his first major press conference in recent memory, President Joe Biden flubbed almost as soon as he finished reading off the teleprompter.

Responding to a question Thursday about NATO’s reaction to Biden’s increasingly unsteady future in U.S. politics, the 81-year-old president stumbled over the names of who his vice president, and his major opponent, really were.

“Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president if I didn’t think she was qualified to be vice president,” Biden said, mistakenly referring to Donald Trump instead of Vice President Kamala Harris.

“Why did he call President Trump the Vice President?” asked the official X account of the House GOP moments after the verbal slip.

On Thursday, MSNBC dug up a clip from 2022 of Trump expressing some pretty convincing familiarity with the people behind Project 2025—and potentially hinting at knowing that the document was in the works.

“Our country is going to hell. The critical job of institutions such as Heridges to [sic] lay the groundwork,” Trump stumbled. “And Heridges does such an incredible job at that,” Trump added, stumbling again.

“They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do, when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America, and that’s coming,” Trump said, seeming to imply Project 2025.

The comments were made during an April 2022 keynote speech by Trump at a Heritage Foundation event where he was introduced by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. In that speech, he praised Heritage Board Chairman Barb Van Andel-Gaby as well as Heritage fellows Tom Homan and Mark Morgan—all of whom he now claims he doesn’t know at all.

“Already we have shown the power of our winning formula, working closely with many of the great people at Heritage over the four incredible years that we’ve worked with you a lot, and we were just discussing it with Kevin,” Trump said during the 2022 speech in his typical rambling style. “They’re going to work on some other things that are going to be very exciting, I think, Kevin, I think maybe the most exciting of all.”

“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it,” Trump claimed late Wednesday night. Trump issued his first denial of Project 2025 last Friday, declaring to closed ears, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it.”

CNN found nearly 140 former Trump aides and advisers who have contributed to Project 2025, including six former members of his Cabinet, four of his ambassadors, and Republican National Committee members appointed to their positions in coordination with the Trump campaign. The document functions as a sort of light-speed roadmap for an impending Republican presidency, laying pathways to actualize Trump’s mass deportation plan, consolidate federal agency power, and dismantle LGBTQ+ and abortion rights. Trump has tried in vain to distance himself from Project 2025 and its patently extreme agenda, presumably hoping to woo voters with softer stances before flipping once elected. Either Trump is struggling with a pretty sizable memory lapse, or he’s lying.

It may become easier than ever before to lock and load guns in the United States, a country plagued by gun violence, thanks to a small business keen on selling bullets in possibly the simplest way imaginable: a vending machine.

American Rounds LLC currently has its bullet vending machine operations in Alabama, Oklahoma, and Texas, though the company has plans to expand to several other states. The Dallas-based company claims that its “automated ammo retail machines” utilize artificial intelligence to ensure potential buyers are of legal purchasing age. The one-stop drop shops can be found in eight different supermarkets across the trio of Southern states.

“As a company our team are supporters of law abiding responsible gun ownership,” said Grant Magers, CEO of American Rounds, in an email to Gizmodo. “We believe in the second amendment and that … a safe and secure method to sell ammunition is needed in the market.”

Magers told NPR in a separate statement that the ammo supply company intends to open another vending machine in Colorado this week and has had “requests” to bring their services to Hawaii, Alaska, California, Florida, and “every state in between for the most part.”

“We have currently about 200 grocery stores that we’re working on fulfilling orders on machines for,” Magers told the radio network.

American Rounds is of the belief that its service is safer than the traditional method of ammunition sales, which typically sees boxes stocked on shelves in gun stores or big-box stores, such as Walmart or Cabela’s. But selling just ammunition requires very little government oversight: The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives does not require someone to obtain a federal license in order to sell bullets, and only a handful of states have passed laws necessitating background checks for their sale or purchase.

“If you look at the way it is currently sold in our country, we are the safest and most secure method of ammo retail sales on the market today,” Magers said, noting the machines also prevent underage customers from simply stealing boxes of bullets.

Critics of the easy-access machines argue that American Rounds isn’t providing any solutions that aren’t already presented by traditional gun retailers, who have the added ability to research whether someone’s criminal convictions prohibit them from buying ammunition, as well as assess a buyer’s mental and emotional state.

“A vending machine is not going to be able to say, ‘Hey are you OK?’ or ‘Why do you need this ammunition?’” George Tita, a professor of criminology, law, and society at the University of California, Irvine, told NPR.

Against the background of expanding weapons access, gun violence in the United States has become so ubiquitous that it is almost silent. In the first half of the year, 287 mass shootings across the country claimed the lives of 301 people and injured another 1,261, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive.

While the dam might not yet be breaking, there sure are plenty of leaks: Some Biden aides and operatives overseeing his reelection campaign now see his chances of winning against Trump at zero.

“No one involved in the effort thinks he has a path,” one person working to reelect Biden told NBC News.

Concerns of Biden’s viability have grown following his shockingly bad debate performance in late June. Biden’s campaign at the time brushed aside widespread concerns from Democrats as ephemeral angst from “the bedwetting brigade.” Now it seems even some on his campaign see the writing on the wall, with some aides discussing how best to convince Biden it’s time to sail off into the sunset.

One campaign official who spoke with NBC described a perfect storm of impasses for Biden and concerns about his mental fitness, fundraising, and unfavorable polling, with two-thirds of voters thinking he should step aside.

“We have this window, and the White House is just running out the clock, which is so selfish,” a longtime Democratic presidential campaign strategist told NBC. “We’re all waiting around for Joe Biden to f--- up again, which is not a great position to be in.”

“He needs to drop out,” another Biden campaign official told NBC. “He will never recover from this.”

Since his debate performance two weeks ago, Biden has said multiple times he will not leave the race.

“I wouldn’t be running again if I did not absolutely believe I was the best person to beat Donald Trump in 2024,” Biden most recently wrote in a letter to Democrats on Monday. But nothing has been able to quell growing calls for Biden to step aside. On Wednesday, Politico reported deep blue New York is on the brink of becoming a swing state thanks to lackluster support for Biden, with local candidates being advised to avoid attaching themselves to him.

“I worry that the symbol of our party is the person who’s running for president and that that does absolutely trickle down to the down ballot races,” one state party chair told NBC News.

Despite those concerns, an internal memo to Biden campaign staff asserting that he still has a shot circulated on Thursday.

“Our internal data and public polling show the same thing: this remains a margin-of-error race in key battleground states,” campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon and campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez wrote. “The movement we have seen, while real, is not a sea-change in the state of the race—while some of this movement was from undecided voters to Trump, much of the movement was driven by historically Democratic constituencies moving to undecided.”

“No one is denying that the debate was a setback,” they wrote. “But Joe Biden and this campaign have made it through setbacks before. We are clear eyed about what we need to do to win. And we will win by moving forward, unified as a party, so that every single day between now and election day we focus on defeating Donald Trump.”

It isn’t just Democrats and the rest of the American public: Diplomats and leaders attending the NATO summit are also worried about President Joe Biden’s mental fitness and the increasing likelihood of Trump winning in November.

“It’s a very weird feeling to be in Europe listening to the president of the United States, and you’re more stressed about whether he will go off script than being excited to listen to the leader of the free world,” one senior European diplomat told Politico.  “You’re worried if he knows which direction he’s going or whether he’s going to fall or what he’s going to forget or if he’ll say ‘North Korea’ when he meant ‘South Korea.’ It’s just a weird experience.”

The diplomats that Politico spoke to expressed concern about Trump returning to the White House and overhauling or even ending the alliance, which the former president and convicted felon has repeatedly promised he will do.

“Everyone’s focusing on Biden’s appearance and less on Trump’s statements about NATO,” a senior European diplomat said, also expressing concern about Trump’s age. “He’s not that much younger.”

Another diplomat was more frank.

“He didn’t look good,” the diplomat said about Biden, speaking on the condition of anonymity along with the rest of Politico’s sources within the visiting delegations.

As heads of state arrived on Wednesday for the summit, many faced questions from the media about their thoughts on whether Biden was in a weaker state following his widely panned debate performance from two weeks ago. None gave any clear praise or defense of Biden, instead dodging questions about the president and saying that they would respect America’s political process.

“I’m not going to comment on this topic,” said Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who walked off after speaking for just a few minutes.

While it’s not a campaign event, the summit has been critical for Biden to demonstrate that he can handle himself on the world stage with international leaders, and can thus reassure the public that he is up to another four years as president. But the visiting members of NATO have other, arguably more important concerns.

“All the Americans are looking for at this summit is the photo op of Biden with allies,” one official said. “We’re really concerned that the world will essentially be leaderless for the next several months, and then we don’t know what comes after that.”