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'Someone's Going to Get Killed': Georgia Official Blasts GOP Silence on Election Threats |
"Someone's going to get hurt, someone's going to get shot, someone's going to get killed," Gabriel Sterling, with the secretary of state's office, said Tuesday afternoon in an emotional and forceful news conference. "It's not right."
Among other things, a Twitter thread accusing a young technician working on the recount of altering votes led to his identity being released and calls for him to be "hung for treason."
Meanwhile, caravans of horn-honking Trump supporters constantly parade past Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's private residence, and his wife has reportedly received sexually explicit threats. The president himself, who has falsely suggested he won Georgia's 16 electoral votes, has called on Republican Gov. Brian Kemp to overturn the election.
In a tweet Tuesday evening responding to Sterling's news conference, Trump again falsely alleged massive voter fraud in Georgia.
Sterling, a fixture in recent weeks as a calm, even-tempered source of election information and factoids about the complicated counting processes, unloaded on Trump, both Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue and other GOP officials that have egged on the party's base to believe in widespread fraud.
"It has to stop," he said. "Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language. Senators, you have not condemned this language or these actions. This has to stop. We need you to step up. And if you take a position of leadership, show some."
Sterling said the situation came to a head with a report that a Gwinnett County technician was outed and receiving death threats after a video circulated online purportedly showing him manipulating data as part of an official recount.
"A 20-something tech in Gwinnett County today has death threats and a noose put out saying he should be hung for treason because he was transferring a report on batches from an EMS to a county computer so he could read it," Sterling said.
"His family is getting harassed now. There's a noose out there with his name on it. And it's not right," he said, adding: "I've got police protection outside my house. Fine. You know, I took a higher-profile job. I get it, the secretary ran for office; his wife knew that, too. This kid took a job. He just took a job, and it's just wrong."
Ron Watkins, the former administrator of extremist site 8kun that played host to posts from the QAnon conspiracy theory, was one of the main boosters of that video. Watkins has also encouraged followers to monitor and livestream several county elections warehouses in search of evidence of impropriety.
Tuesday afternoon, police were called to a Gwinnett County location where a man who was livestreaming video followed workers he believed were secretly transporting voting machines in violation of a court order. In the video, an officer explained that boxes were full of office phones and told the man he was trespassing.
Trump, both of Georgia's U.S. senators, many House members, several GOP state lawmakers and the chair of the Republican Party of Georgia have all cast doubt on the 2020 election process with little to no evidence of fraud or wrongdoing.
Sterling said those leaders, especially Perdue and Loeffler, need to "step up" and fight back against conspiracies.
"You have to be responsible in your rhetoric, you have to be responsible in your statements, you have to be responsible in your deeds," Sterling said. "That shouldn't be too much to ask for people who asked for us to give them responsibility.
In response, Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said: "The campaign is focused on ensuring that all legal votes are counted and all illegal votes are not. No one should engage in threats or violence, and if that has happened, we condemn that fully."
Both Perdue and Loeffler said they condemn any sort of violence but won't apologize for their harsh questioning of Georgia's election administration.
Read Sterling's full remarks below:
"Good afternoon. My name is Gabriel Sterling and I'm the voting system implementation manager for State of Georgia. And just to give you a heads up, this is going to be sort of a two-part press conference today. At the beginning of this, I'm going to do my best to keep it together.
Because it has all gone too far. All of it.
Joe diGenova today asked for Chris Krebs, a patriot who ran CISA, to be shot. A 20-something tech in Gwinnett County today has death threats and a noose put out, saying he should be hung for treason because he was transferring a report on batches from an EMS to a county computer so he could read it.
It has to stop.
Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language. Senators, you have not condemned this language or these actions. This has to stop. We need you to step up. And if you take a position of leadership, show some.
My boss, Secretary Raffensperger — his address is out there. They have people doing caravans in front of their house, they've had people come onto their property. Tricia, his wife of 40 years, is getting sexualized threats through her cellphone.
It has to stop.
This is elections, this is the backbone of democracy, and all of you who have not said a damn word are complicit in this. It's too much.
Yes, fight for every single vote. Go through your due process, we encourage you — use your First Amendment. That's fine. Death threats, physical threats, intimidation — it's too much. It's not right. We've lost the moral high ground to claim that it is.
I don't have all the best words to do this because I'm angry, and the straw that broke the camel's back today is, again, this 20-year-old contractor for a voting system company just trying to do his job. In fact, I talked to Dominion today and they said he's one of the better ones they got. His family is getting harassed now. There's a noose out there with his name on it. And it's not right.
I've got police protection outside my house. Fine. You know, I took a higher-profile job. I get it, Secretary ran for office, his wife knew that, too. This kid took a job. He just took a job, and it's just wrong.
I can't begin to explain the level of anger I have right now over this, and every American, every Georgian, Republican and Democrat alike, should have that same level of anger.
Mr. President, it looks like you likely lost the state of Georgia. We're investigating. There's always a possibility, I get it, and you have the rights to go through the courts. What you don't have the ability to do — and you need to step up and say this — is stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone's going to get hurt. Someone's going to get shot. Someone's going to get killed. And it's not right.
It's not right. And I don't have anything scripted — this is like I said, I will do my best to keep it together. All of this is wrong. DiGenova, who said for Chris Krebs to get shot, is a former U.S. attorney. He knows better. The people around the president know better.
Mr. President, as the secretary said yesterday, people aren't giving you the best advice on what's actually going on the ground. It's time to look forward if you want to run for reelection in four years. Fine, do it. But everything we're seeing right now, there's not a path. Be the bigger man here and stop. Step in, tell your supporters: Don't be violent, don't intimidate. All that's wrong. It's unAmerican.
I don't know what else to say on that front. I mean, these are elections. One of our goals was to make elections boring again. Well, guess what? That didn't happen. This is all wrong. It's all too much, and that's I'll leave that for there."
Police officers sit in the court as suspects are seen behind a fence in Cairo, Egypt, July 28 2018. (photo: Reuters)
Amnesty International: Steep Rise in Executions in Egypt in Past Two Months
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Egypt executed 57 men and women in October and November, nearly double the 32 people reported in the whole of 2019, Amnesty International said."
Rights group says executions ‘particularly appalling’ due to ‘systematic breaches of fair trials’ documented in Egypt.
gypt executed 57 men and women in October and November, nearly double the 32 people reported in the whole of 2019, Amnesty International said.
At least 15 of those executed had been sentenced to death in cases related to political violence following what Amnesty called unfair trials, the London-based human rights group said in a report released on Wednesday.
“The Egyptian authorities have embarked on a horrifying execution spree in recent months, putting scores of people to death, in some cases following grossly unfair mass trials,” Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Research and Advocacy Director Philip Luther said.
Luther added that executions in the country were “particularly appalling” considering all the “well documented and systematic breaches of fair trial rights in Egypt with courts often relying on torture-tainted ‘confessions'”.
The Reuters news agency said Egypt’s state news centre and the interior ministry could not be reached for comment on the Amnesty report.
Amnesty said state authorities have also arrested human rights activists dealing with the issue of a death penalty in the country.
Staff members of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) were arrested in November and interrogated about the group’s criminal justice work.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has said there are no political prisoners in Egypt and stability and security are paramount.
Egyptian courts have sentenced some 3,000 people to death since 2014, when el-Sisi became president, according to the Arab Network for Human Rights Information, an independent organisation that documents human rights violations in the Middle East and North Africa.
That is compared with fewer than 800 death sentences in the previous six years, according to Amnesty International.
The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, at the G20 summit on 20 November 2020. (photo: Europa Newswire)
UN Secretary General: Humanity Faces Climate 'Suicide' Without US Rejoining Paris Agreement
Mark Hertsgaard, Guardian UK
Hertsgaard writes: "Joining China and other big polluters, Biden's pledge of 'net zero' emissions by 2050 brings the Paris agreement goals 'within reach.'"
he way we are moving is a suicide,” the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, said in an interview on Monday, and humanity’s survival will be “impossible” without the United States rejoining the Paris agreement and achieving “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050, as the incoming Biden administration has pledged.The secretary general said that “of course” he had been in touch with President-elect Biden and looked forward to welcoming the US into a “global coalition for net zero by 2050” that the UN has organized. The US is the world’s largest cumulative source of heat-trapping emissions and its biggest military and economic power, Guterres noted, so “there is no way we can solve the [climate] problem … without strong American leadership.”
In an extraordinary if largely unheralded diplomatic achievement, most of the world’s leading emitters have already joined the UN’s “net zero by 2050” coalition, including the European Union, Japan, the United Kingdom and China (which is the world’s largest source of annual emissions and has committed to achieving carbon neutrality “before 2060”). India, meanwhile, the world’s third largest annual emitter, is the only Group of 20 country on track to limit temperature rise to 2C by 2100, despite needing to lift many of its people out of poverty, an achievement Guterres called “remarkable”. Along with Russia, the US has been the only major holdout, after Donald Trump group Climate Action Tracker. If so, temperature rise could be limited to 2.1C, the group said – higher than the agreement’s target of 1.5 to 2C, but a major improvement from the 3 to 5C future that business as usual would deliver.
“The targets set at Paris were always meant to be increased over time,” Guterres said. “[Now,] we need to align those commitments with a 1.5C future, and then you must implement.”
Reiterating scientists’ warning that humanity faces “a climate emergency”, the secretary general said that achieving carbon neutrality by 2050 is imperative to avoiding “irreversible” impacts that would be “absolutely devastating for the world economy and for human announced he was withdrawing the US from the Paris agreement soon after becoming president four years ago.
The new pledges could bring the Paris agreement’s goals “within reach”, provided that the pledges are fulfilled, concluded an analysis by the independent research life”. He said rich countries must honor their obligation under the Paris agreement to provide $100bn a year to help developing countries limit their own climate pollution and adapt to the heatwaves, storms and sea level rise already under way. The trillions of dollars now being invested to revive pandemic-battered economies also must be spent in a “green” way, Guterres argued, or today’s younger generations will inherit “a wrecked planet”. And he predicted that the oil and gas industry, in its present form, will die out before the end of this century as economies shift to renewable energy sources.
The secretary general’s interview, conducted by CBS News, the Times of India, and El País on behalf of the journalistic consortium Covering Climate Now, is part of a 10-day push by the UN to reinvigorate the Paris agreement before a follow-up conference next year. That conference, known as the 26th conference of the parties, or COP 26, was supposed to take place this week but was postponed due to the pandemic. On 12 December 2020, Guterres will mark the fifth anniversary of the signing of the Paris agreement by convening a global climate summit with Boris Johnson, who as prime minister of the UK is the official host of COP 26, which occurs in Glasgow, Scotland, next November.
A total of 110 countries have joined the “net zero by 2050” coalition, the secretary general said, a development he attributed to growing recognition of the increasingly frequent and destructive extreme weather events climate change is unleashing around the world and the “tremendous pressure” governments have faced from civil society, including millions of young people protesting in virtually every country as well as more and more of the private sector.
“Governments, until now, thought to a certain extent that they could do whatever they wanted,” Guterres said. “But now … we see the youth mobilizing in fantastic ways all over the world.” And with solar and other renewable energy sources now cheaper than carbon-based equivalents, investors are realizing that “the sooner that they move … to portfolios linked to the new green and digital economy, the best it will be for their own assets and their own clients.”
For a global economy that still relies on oil, gas and coal for most of its energy and much of its food production, moving to “net zero” by 2050 nevertheless represents a tectonic shift – all the more so because scientists calculate that emissions must fall roughly by half over the next 10 years to hit the 2050 target. Achieving those goals will require fundamental shifts in both public and private policy, including building no new coal plants and phasing out existing ones, Guterres said. Governments must also reform tax and subsidy practices.
There should be “no more subsidies for fossil fuels”, the secretary general said. “It doesn’t make any sense that taxpayers’ money is spent destroying the planet. At the same time, we should shift taxation from income to carbon, from taxpayers to polluters. I’m not asking governments to increase taxes. I’m asking governments to reduce the taxes on payrolls or on companies that commit to invest in green energy and put that level of taxation on carbon pollution.”
Governments must also ensure a “just transition” for the people and communities affected by the phase-out of fossil fuels, with workers getting unemployment payments and retraining for jobs in the new green economy. “When I was in government [as the prime minister of Portugal], we had to close all the coalmines,” he recalled. “We did everything we could to make sure that those who were working in those mines would have their futures guaranteed.”
The “cycle of oil as the key engine of the world economy is finished,” Guterres said. By the end of the 21st century, petroleum might still be used “as raw materials for different products … but the role of fossil fuels as [an energy source] will be minimal”. As for fossil fuel companies’ stated ambitions to continue producing more oil, gas and coal, Guterres said that throughout history various economic sectors have risen and fallen and that the digital sector has now displaced the fossil fuel sector as the center of the global economy. “I’m totally convinced that a lot of the oil and gas that is today in the soil,” he said, “will remain in the soil”.
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