Episode 101“We’re in the Fight” with Ken Blackwell and J. Christian Adams

Episode 101: “We’re in the Fight” with Ken Blackwell and J. Christian Adams Bill Walton:                   00:08 Welcome to the special edition of The Bill Walton Show. I'm here with the Honorable Ken Blackwell, who is an advisory board member of the 2020 Trump-Pence campaign, and J christian Adams, who's president and general counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation and a former justice department official. And we're here to talk about where we stand with the presidential election, and possibly also where things stand with the Georgia Senate races. Ken, let's kick it off. Where are we now? This is a state by state issue. Can you frame it for me? Ken Blackwell:               00:45                Absolutely, Bill. We're in the fight. We have a lot of runway in front of us. We have to guard against anybody prematurely throwing in the towel. There is a case that can be prosecuted in these states, both in the courts and in the civic political arena, and we can win the day. But I've worked in Pennsylvania, right next to Ohio. I was in Pittsburgh, been in Philadelphia, and yesterday the campaign started, it's making its case in a federal district court before an Obama judge. This case will probably go to the Third Circuit and then a court of appeals, and then onto the Supreme Court. It's around two principal ideas, one, that the governor and the secretary of state and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overstepped their authority when they, in the last minute, changed the rules of the election and the procedures impacting the count. That is a violation of Article Two of the US Constitution, which says that the calendar and the procedures, or the policies, are established by the state legislature. The other was an equal protection provision. There is now a mountain of evidence that voters got treated unevenly in the state of Pennsylvania. There were folks who were allowed to cure their ballots and others who were not. And at question here will be about 640,000 ballots, and that's more than enough to change the count. The other thing I'll close in saying, we have worked on making sure that the state legislature understands that when this evidence is mounted, when a decision is made that there was an unequal application of the law, they can make the decision as to who is seated in the electoral college. And they have about 20 electoral college votes. Bill Walton:                   03:20                Before I jump to Christian, what's the calendar in Pennsylvania? Can we prove, I guess, the state legislature versus a Supreme Court ruling or overseeing what an election law to be is pretty clear, but there's other stuff we've got to prove. What's the calendar? Do we have enough time to- Ken Blackwell:               03:40                We have enough time. Remember in Bush v. Gore, there were 37 days where this was pounded out. The short calendar is that we have until December the 13th. December the 14th is when the electoral college meets and there's ample time to prosecute this case. And we, in fact, must make sure that we prosecute it both in the court of public opinion and in the federal court system. And we can get it done. Bill Walton:                   04:21                Christian, you're focusing on Georgia and Arizona? Christian Adams:           04:25                Right. In Georgia today, there's going to be a recount of sorts. We should have some interesting news later in the day. Arizona, we have a trial or a mini evidentiary hearing on Friday. We represent a woman who was attempting to vote on the machines. She put her ballot into the scanner, and it did not accept her vote. And then she was told, "It's time to go away. You don't get a chance to fix anything." And she's just one of many hundreds of people who experienced something very similar in Arizona. And it's a vote denial case. Her vote was denied because of the complications of the machine. So Ken is exactly right, there's a lot of runway here. In Pennsylvania, you have a case, it doesn't even require voter fraud. It's all about being treated differently, by changing the rules in the middle of the game, which happened to all over the country, Bill. All over the country, the left, the Democrats, were attempting to change the rules of the election in the middle of the game. And that's not supposed to be now it works. Bill Walton:                   05:32                Well, I guess it sounds like you would agree with my view that Trump needs to fight this until every legal vote is counted and every illegal vote is tossed out. Because I think if you count it up that way, he won probably by a wide margin. Ken Blackwell:               05:48                Absolutely, Bill. Look, and let's not leave out Georgia. Because Georgia is a great case to say that we're fighting this on three tracks. We're fighting on the track of getting an honest count in the presidential race. We are actually positioning ourselves to root out the fraud and the irregularities in the system to make sure that none of that nonsense impacts the very important race that they have on January the 5th which will be around those two Senate seats. But just as important as those two tracks is the third track. When the Georgia State Legislature comes back into their regular session, along with the other state legislatures across the country, we must be able to prosecute immediately and execute reforms to make sure that this doesn't come around, this sort of nonsense doesn't come around, and bite us in the butt in the 2022 elections. They must start listening to Christian Adams, and Cleta Mitchell, and Hans over at Heritage. And they've been focusing us on making sure that we look at process. And our inattention to looking at process has created this mess that we're in right now. Bill Walton:                   07:15                One of the reasons I'm doing these special editions of the show is that we've got to get the word out. The left, the media, the Democrats, have already pronounced themselves judge, jury, and executioner. And everybody's supposed to be acting like Biden is already president. How do we fight the public opinion war here? Christian Adams:           07:37                Well, that's a hard one because of course the media is lockstep in whatever Joe Biden and the Democrats won. But what you do is you keep fighting. That's the best way, is you press, you press, and you press, and you articulate to the American people how unfair it is to treat different counties in Pennsylvania differently. You have one set of rules for Philadelphia, you have another set of rules for Westmoreland County in Pennsylvania. That's not fair. In places like Arizona, you have lots of people who didn't get their vote counted because of the machines. That's not fair. In Georgia, you have disaster after disaster, frankly, of flash drives turning up. You have people who got extra time to vote because of some mysterious water main break. You have all of these strange circumstances, including a secretary of state that signed a consent decree with the Stacey Abrams camp to get rid of a state law involving signature requirement. That is not supposed to be how elections work. Bill Walton:                   08:42                Have the social media giants been suppressing this? Christian Adams:           08:46                Oh my gosh. Every time you tweet a fact about this, just basic stuff, right? Basic things like in Nevada, how many people were registered at vacant lots that we documented and commercial addresses? And when people tweet that they get a Twitter warning that this is subject to a different opinion, I guess. I guess facts, no longer opinions. So, yes, Bill, it is definitely the focus of the Twitter analytics. Ken Blackwell:               09:21                As Lewis Carroll said through his character, Alice in Wonderland, things are getting "curiouser and curiouser." Just absolutely strange. And all we have to do is to get in front of the American people some simple facts. What they want us to believe is that now that the evidence proves that Donald Trump had long coattails, long coattails, the left and the mainstream media, they want us to believe he didn't have a coat on. So all of a sudden, they want us to disregard what we now know, that this president turned out, without padding, 72 plus million folks that fundamentally, fundamentally were in the process to make sure that we did not undo the Constitutional Republic that has made us the envy of the world in our 244 years of existence. Bill Walton:                   10:23                Well, and his coattails, the Republicans were supposed to get clobbered this time. And we ended up picking up, I think this is right, three state houses and one governorship. And we almost made Nancy Pelosi the ex speaker of the house with a razor thin margin. I don't know what she might even get reelected as speaker. And then the Senate, we were supposed to lose three or four seats in the Senate. And if things go well in Georgia, we're down one in a position to block some really bad stuff there. Ken Blackwell:               10:57                Well, I'll tell you, working with Christian and Hans and Cleta, the old saying coming out of Ronald Reagan was, "Trust, but verify." We flipped this on its head. It is verify, verify, and then you can trust. Bill Walton:                   11:16                Are we getting the story out about things like happened in Wayne County in Michigan, where they had the county electors certifying the vote, and the Antifa came in and intimidated them and called out their kids and their address and all that sort of thing. I'm really concerned about this intimidation game that's going on. Christian Adams:           11:37                Well, they're very good at it because it's in their DNA. They're the children of 1917, and they're very good at using the threat of force. And, obviously, using force to achieve political ends. It's a very anti-American phenomena. Ken Blackwell:               11:56                Absolutely. These are the same folks who chased Senator McConnell out of a restaurant, Senator Cruz. These are the same folks. And with complicity from the media of outing peoples in terms of their address, so that they could have a racket made in the wee hours of the morning and their children can be intimidated. This has to stop. This has to push back. And I'll tell you, the president has done a real good job of realigning this country, politically. What happened organically in Washington, DC this past weekend when hundreds of thousands of Americans came out, that was not organized by the campaign. That was organic, and people spoke. And I will tell you, when I was coming back from DC to Ohio, I was impressed with the number of folks who had on MAGA hats. People are not hiding. They understand what happened, they could feel it. And we, in fact, must keep our foot to the pedal. We have to keep the [crosstalk 00:00:13:15] Bill Walton:                   13:16                Yeah, we've got to fight it till we win. I was really happy to see Sidney Powell added to the Trump team. And she's out with this presentation on the software fraud. What your guys' take on that? Christian Adams:           13:33                Well, look, I'll be candid about this. This election will be won or lost on the basis of the paper votes, right? We've got the paper votes. We don't need to worry about magical back doors from Venezuela. We're going to be able to do a paper recount to figure out who won. To figure out if, in fact, the software fraud theory is accurate or not. I think that people who were in the space in election administration realize that it's not as simple sometimes as magic solutions. It's cumulative chaos upon cumulative chaos that frequently results in this sort of thing. The free market will decide whether or not Dominion is at risk of their market position. The paper ballots will decide whether or not there's merit to that story. So we're just going to stay tuned and watch. Ken Blackwell:               14:35                Let me just say that Sidney and that group who are prosecuting that particular case, they add to what Christian just said. Because our expertise happens to be in the space that... We can prove that there was not verification. We can prove disruption in the chain of custody. And I hope that they can prove not only the malfunctioning, but the manipulation of that equipment. So we welcome them putting on that pile of evidence. What we've tried to do is stay in our lane where we have expertise and where we can get more immediate confirmation that this election was stolen. Bill Walton:                   15:21                What are your thoughts on this? The big thing here was the introducing the mail-in ballots and doing that with the cover of the COVID-19. And we ended up with 70, 80 million mail-in ballots, which totally disrupted the sanctity of the Tuesday in November Election Day ending at 8:00 AM or 8:00 PM. And then we kept counting after that. It seems to me like the mail ends and the continuing the counting on and on and on until you find out what number you need to win is... We can't fix it now. That genie's out of the bottle. But how do we fix that for 2022? Christian Adams:           16:01                Well, a lot of the movement to mail was by Emergency COVID Act. So it's not necessarily legislative in most of these places, which is part of the outrage of what occurred over the last eight months. Look, the left woke up in March and deliberately had... I watched some of these meetings online, some of these Zoom calls, deliberately set about to fundamentally transform how we elect people in this country. They focused on vote by mail because it's decentralized. It cannot be monitored by election authorities. And that's exactly why no Western democracy uses vote by mail. It's totally a system that encourages shenanigans, fraud, manipulation, intimidation, disenfranchisement, I might add. In other words, ballots get lost in the mail and the inability to cure mail ballots once they get back. That you can't fix it like you can when you're in the voting place. So it's the worst possible way to elect people. And that's what we did in 2020. Ken Blackwell:               17:00                Yeah, and again, just apply what Christian just talked about to Georgia. And it just makes what the secretary of state did in Georgia just unthinkable. And that was to say that there was no need to verify signatures on a lot of these mail in ballots. That is crazy. How he ceded that to Stacey Abrams, I just can't get my mind wrapped around it. It just stinks. Bill Walton:                   17:33                Do we have enough people on the ground to push our way through to successful outcomes in these states? And if not, what should be people thinking and doing? I know the Democrats are encouraging people to move to Georgia so they can vote in the Democrat or the elections for Senate, which is, as I understand it, a felony. But what should people be doing legally to help push us towards victory? Christian Adams:           17:58                Well, I just heard that in Georgia they don't have enough people to watch the recount process on the Republican side. I just heard that there's just not enough hands on deck to be there. And I know some of the people who were there wish there was four or five of them cloned to work. And that's one problem. Bill Walton:                   18:22                So an action item is we need to flood more people into Georgia. What about the other states? Ken Blackwell:               18:29                Absolutely. And Jenny Beth Martin and Tea Party Patriots, they're helping Collins coordinate that effort, Representative Collins. So, look, the other thing that we can do is to take a look as this case works its way up the chain, the federal chain, to the Supreme Court in Pennsylvania, I would say pray for John Eastman, who is pushing through COVID. So he's being quarantined, but he's a great constitutional attorney. We need to make sure that he works side by side with Rudy and that team, because he has experience, he can make the case. His addition would strengthen the team. Bill Walton:                   19:25                Christian, we've got just a minute or two left here. Could you give us kind of your final thought of what we ought to be focusing on for the next three to four weeks? Christian Adams:           19:36                Right. Look, it's all going to boil down to Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. You have to have more votes in Arizona. You have to have a constitutional realization that what happened in Pennsylvania violated, explicitly, the terms of the US Constitution. And in Georgia, you have to have a recount that shows vote gains. Those are the three pressure points. Bill Walton:                   20:04                Ken? Ken Blackwell:               20:05                I couldn't say it any better. I won't even try to improve on that. That's our laser focus. Bill Walton:                   20:12 Okay. We've got our focus. And thanks, guys. J Christian Adams and Ken Blackwell, real stars in this fight. Really appreciate all the work you're doing. And so, thanks. We'll have you back on when we can do a victory party, how's that? Ken Blackwell:               20:27 Thank you, Bill. Christian Adams:           20:27 Take care, Bill. Ken Blackwell:               20:28 Anyway, for everyone out there, thanks for listening. We'd love to hear what you think. Let me know on Parler, Facebook or Twitter, where you can find The Bill Walton Show. For previous episodes, you can find us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and YouTube, and of course @thebillwaltonshow.com. Recorded Announ...:     20:45 Thanks for listening. Want more? Be sure to subscribe @thebillwaltonshow.com or on iTunes.