May 7—Secretary of State Mac Warner claims "there was nothing secret or nefarious about " the February meeting of select Republican top election officials hosted by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing think tanks.
Then why did Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at Heritage and one of the event's moderators and presenters, tell a Texas official, "This is not a public event. It is a private, confidential meeting of the secretaries. I would rather you not send out a press release about it."
"Confidential, " by the way, means "secret." So there's one false statement from Warner. He also repeated false claims about the 2020 election that we've addressed in the past (DP-1-16-22) and added a couple new ones, which we wish we had the space to address.
While the descriptor "nefarious " is subjective, we can make a strong case the secret meeting was, in fact, nefarious—largely because of the extremism of its panelists and moderators, not all of whom can be named here.
There was Jason Snead of the Honest Elections Project (one of the conference's three sponsors), which spent millions on anti-mail-in voting ads that also implied Democrats would cheat during the 2020 election. And Trump's former deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Ken Cuccinelli, who is the national chairman of Election Transparency Initiative. ETI, by the way, joined with two other conservative activist groups to mobilize opposition in West Virginia to the For the People Act of...
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