Dirty Tricks-- Sometimes They Work And Sometimes They Don't... Rudy In 1993, Trump In 2020

In 1989 Rudy Giuliani narrowly lost to David Dinkins in the NYC mayoral race, 917,544 (50.4%) to 870,464 (478%). Giuliani won Staten Island and Queens. 4 years later, there was a rematch and Giuliani won those same 2 boroughs and again lost the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan— but not big enough margins. This time it was Giuliani who narrowly won the election, 930,263 (50.9%) to 876,869 (48.0%). How there’ll did that happen? Was it really about broken windows and the massive turnout in Staten Island?

Yesterday, Maya Yang reported that Giuliani publicly bragged to Steve Bannon and Kari Lake about a dirty trick his campaign used to depress Hispanic voting. Lake’s response: “We need dirty tricks.”

Giuliani explained that he spent $2 million to set up a so-called Voter Integrity Committee which was headed by Randy Levine, current president of the New York Yankees baseball team, and John Sweeney, a former [upstate] New York Republican congressman.

“So they went through East Harlem, which is all Hispanic, and they gave out little cards, and the card said: ‘If you come to vote, make sure you have your green card because INS are picking up illegals.’ So they spread it all over the Hispanic …” said Giuliani, referring to the now defunct US Immigration and Naturalization Service before trailing off.

…Giuliani went on to reveal that following the election, which he won against then incumbent mayor David Dinkins by around 53,000 votes, then president Bill Clinton’s justice department launched an investigation into him.

“[Then-attorney general] Janet Reno is coming after us, we violated civil rights,” Giuliani recalled his lawyer Dennison Young telling him. Giuliani then reassured Young, saying: “What civil rights did we violate? They don’t have civil rights! All we did was prevent people who can’t vote from voting. Maybe we tricked them, but tricking is not a crime.”

“In those days, we didn’t have crazy prosecutors. Nowadays, they’ll probably prosecute you for it … and that’s the way we kept down the Hispanic vote,” Giuliani said.

…The Huffington Post compiled a handful of media reports from the time which collectively point towards Giuliani’s voter suppression tactics during the election.

A 1993 New York Times article published at the time of the election reported that Dinkins had called for a news conference to “accuse the Giuliani camp of waging ‘an outrageous campaign of voter intimidation and dirty tricks’”.

One of the charges included English and Spanish pro-Dinkins posters that were allegedly put up at the time in Washington Heights and the Bronx, predominantly Hispanic and Black areas. “The posters suggested that illegal immigrants would be arrested at the polls and deported if they tried to vote,” the New York Times reported.

An article published in the socialist journal Against the Current months after the election also mentioned the posters.

“Cops put up phony Dinkins posters in mostly Dominican Washington Heights, saying the INS would be checking voters’ documents at the polls. In some cases police themselves asked Latino voters for their passports,” wrote labor and social activist Andy Pollack.

Similarly, a Washington Post report published days after the election cited complaints surrounding voter suppression in the city.

“Among the complaints are the placing of signs on telephone poles and walls in Latino areas warning that ‘federal authorities and immigration officials will be at all election sites … Immigration officials will be at locations to arrest and deport undocumented illegal voters,’” the Post reported.

A statement issued by the then justice department on 2 November 1993 said: “The Department of Justice is aware that posters have been placed throughout New York City misinforming voters about the role of federal officials in today’s elections … Federal observers are in New York to protect the rights of minority voters. They are not there to enforce immigration laws.”

You think Giuliani was a dirty tricks kind of guy… he was a piker compared to Trump, who went as far as selling himself to Russia, the Saudis and Israel to win in 2016. On Friday, Maggie Haberman, Alan Feuer and Jonathan Swan reported that special counsel Jack Smith are looking into serious financial crimes committed by Trump’s 2020 PACs, after the election was lost. “[P]rosecutors,” they wrote, “are trying to determine whether Trump and his aides violated federal wire fraud statutes as they raised as much as $250 million through a political action committee by saying they needed the money to fight to reverse election fraud even though they had been told repeatedly that there was no evidence to back up those fraud claims… [I]nvestigators have homed in on the activities of a joint fund-raising committee made up of staff members from the 2020 Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, among others. Some of the subpoenas have sought documents from around Election Day 2020 up the present.”

Prosecutors have been heavily focused on details of the campaign’s finances, spending and fund-raising, such as who was approving email solicitations that were blasted out to lists of possible small donors and what they knew about the truth of the fraud claims, according to the people familiar with their work. All three areas overlap, and could inform prosecutors’ thinking about whether to proceed with charges in an investigation in which witnesses are still being interviewed.

The possibility that the fund-raising efforts might have been criminally fraudulent was first raised last year by the House select committee investigating Trump’s efforts to retain power.

But the Justice Department, with its ability to bring criminal charges, has been able to prompt more extensive cooperation from a number of witnesses. And prosecutors have developed more information than the House committee did, having targeted communications between Trump campaign aides and other Republican officials to determine if a barrage of fund-raising solicitations sent out after the election were knowingly misleading, according to the three people familiar with the matter.

…Prosecutors have also been examining the plan to assemble alternate slates of pro-Trump electors from swing states won by Biden, and the broader push by Trump to block or delay congressional certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory on Jan. 6, 2021, leading to the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters.

On Thursday, Pence, a key witness to Trump’s efforts, testified for hours to the grand jury gathering evidence in the investigation.

Prosecutors have been looking at the nexus between research the Trump campaign commissioned almost immediately after the election to try to prove widespread fraud, public statements that he and his allies made at the time, the fund-raising efforts and the establishment of Save America.

…Immediately after the election, an adviser to the Trump campaign reached out to Ken Block, the owner of a Rhode Island-based firm, Simpatico Software Systems, to have him evaluate specific allegations of fraud.

Block ended up researching multiple claims of possible fraud that Trump’s aides brought to him. He never produced a final report. But each time he investigated a claim, he said in an interview, he found there was nothing to it.

Block said he had disproved “everything that came in and found no substantive fraud sufficient to overturn an election result.” He said he was isolated from what was taking place within the campaign, as Trump railed at aides about staying in office and continued to insist he had won an election that he was repeatedly told he had lost.

“I was kept very walled off from all of the insanity,” said Block, whose firm was paid $735,000, records show. He received a subpoena for documents, but declined in the interview to discuss anything related to the grand jury.

Days after starting to work with Block and Simpatico, the Trump campaign hired a second firm, the Berkeley Research Group. The federal grand jury has received evidence that Berkeley was hired at the suggestion of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who was overseeing the political operation.

The grand jury has been asking questions related to whether Trump was briefed on findings by Berkeley suggesting there had been no widespread fraud.

The company ultimately submitted a report indicating there had been no fraud that would have changed the outcome of the election, and was paid roughly $600,000 for its work. The company was hired through a law firm that has long represented Trump in his personal capacity, Kasowitz Benson Torres, although lawyers there were not involved in pursuing Trump’s election fraud claims, according to a person briefed on the matter.

…During the House Jan. 6 committee’s proceedings last year, several people close to Trump testified that they had informed him that there had been no fraud sufficient to change the outcome of the voting.

Within two weeks of the election, the Trump campaign’s own communications staff drafted an internal report debunking many aspects of a conspiracy theory that voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had been hacked and used to flip votes away from Trump. That report was written before pro-Trump lawyers like Sidney Powell and Rudolph Giuliani promoted the false Dominion story at news conferences and on television.

As part of its investigation into the Trump campaign’s post-election fundraising, the Jan. 6 panel subpoenaed records from Salesforce.com, a vendor that helped the campaign and the Republican National Committee send emails to potential donors. The RNC fought back, filing a lawsuit to quash the subpoena, and the House committee ultimately withdrew it.

The latest round of subpoenas, federal prosecutors have sought documents related to Salesforce in addition to other vendors.

And now watch this video from New Hampshire— by clicking on it— if you have any desire to understand why these dirty tricks work on a certain subset of individuals: