The Brennan Center for Justice testified before the J6 Committee about how The Big Lie is still being told and how it is adversely affecting voting in the midterms and is driving legislation designed to restrict voting rights across key states. You can use this link to access the written version of this testimony or you can download it below.

The Washington Post tracked the 30,573 lies Donald Trump told in his four years as president, but his lies started long before that. His lies about "rigged" elections started in November of 2016, when he defeated Hillary Clinton. He claimed that millions of illegal votes cost him the popular vote, even though he won the election based on the electoral college. Of course, Trump provided no proof of what he was saying, but he really doesn't have to when he's talking to his far-right supporters. They do not require proof. They hang on the pathological liar's every word.

“In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” Trump tweeted.

In fact, rewind to October 2016 when Trump started to slip in the polls and began warning that the election could be "stolen" from him. He pointed specifically to Philadelphia, which is a city with a high African American population and remarked that "we have to make sure we're protected."

So, it's clear that this election fraud stuff was not new to him when he began The Big Lie that Joe Biden and the Democrats stole the 2020 election from him via massive voter fraud. It is also evident that Trump is targeting the Democrats and minorities as the culprits behind all this fraudulent election fraud.

Of course, there was no evidence of any voter fraud in the days following the 2020 election, and there hasn't been any since then. Donald Trump was told this repeatedly by his own aides. Donald Trump does not care, and has not let up with this baseless assertion even today. At every campaign stop, at every right-wing meeting, and all over social media, Donald Trump has continued to brainwash his followers with The Big Lie.

The Big Lie was fuel for the fire that began on January 6, 2021, when a mob of angry Trump supporters, spurred on by his stolen election lies and his call for taking the country back, stormed the Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of a perfectly legitimate election. 

There is no question, after reviewing the hours of video available, that some officials were targeted and were in danger. Mike Pence, Trump's vice president, was one of those people. His crime was refusing to do Trump's bidding. There were calls to "hang Mike Pence" both inside and outside the Capitol building. A noose hanging on makeshift gallows was constructed outside on the mall. 

However, The Big Lie is far more pervasive than that. We came perilously close to losing our democracy that day, but the threat is not over yet. The Big Lie remains a part of our midterm election process, and there is real fear for what will happen in 2024. If we do not deal with this, we may yet lose our democracy. 

The Big Lie is a conspiracy (not a theory) with many moving parts to be explored. American Oversight has done exhaustive research on the alternative electors plot which you can access here. We urge everyone to use the links within this material. The best defense for our democracy is an informed public.

So desperate was Donald Trump to retain power, that he and his supporters moved onto a fake elector plot. This portion of the big lie involved the submission of fake electoral vote certificates signed by Trump supporters and submitted to the National Archives and Congress in seven swing states that went to Joe Biden. The states were Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. This was part of the scheme to prevent congressional certification of the 2020 election.

Although not based in any legal or Constitutional reality, the Trump team pushed forward. John Eastman's now infamous memo indicates the fake elector plot was part of a six-step scheme to prevent Joe Biden from becoming president. We now know that it was a planned, coordinated effort to subvert democracy and deny the will of the people.

The origin of the fake elector scheme came from Trump campaign lawyers. On November 18, 2020, Jim Troupis, a Trump campaign attorney in Wisconsin, received a memo from another attorney, Kenneth Chesebro, outlining an outrageous scheme to appoint alternate electors in the battleground states that went to Biden in an attempt to flip the results in those states. This memo, and another two weeks later, were the earliest-known dates that this plan was afoot.

The fake electors plot was incorporated by Eastman and Rudy Giuliani into a larger scheme that was embraced by Donald Trump. The multi-tentacled Big Lie eventually became the fuel for the January 6 insurrection fire.

FiveThirtyEight is a statistically based site that has done a great job of exposing the dangers The Big Lie poses to voting rights across the nation. You can check out their analysis of voter suppression legislation here, and how states are taking power away from local election officials here.

Even as the J6 Committee airs the sordid details of Trump's Big Lie to the American public, Donald Trump continues spreading the false narrative with stops across the nation in support of candidates for the 2022 midterms. The price of admission for a Trump endorsement is a buy-in to his big lie. In any decent society, a Trump endorsement would be poison, but in this country, there are more than 100 primary winners who back Trump's false stolen election claims.

There are 36 governorships up for grabs this cycle. The power that the governor wields cannot be ignored. Among other things, they have veto power against voter suppression legislation, and they also participate in election certification. In nine states, including Florida, Pennsylvania and Texas, the secretary of state is appointed by the governor. Likewise, the secretary of state is the chief elections official.

In Nevada, for example, a 2020 election skeptic won the primary for secretary of state. In Colorado, Tina Peters, a Republican who was suspended by a judge from overseeing this year's election in her own county because she gave data from voting machines to Mike Lindell and was subsequently indicted, has announced her candidacy for secretary of state.

We have said before that both Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin must be challenged in the primaries with true Democrats, particularly in light of their roles in killing a bill to protect voting rights. However, let's not forget that it was Senate Republicans who blocked an up and down vote on voting rights.

All across the country, Republican legislatures are passing voter suppression bills under the guise of protecting election integrity. These laws, however, have nothing to do with election integrity. They are designed to make voting harder, particularly for minorities who tend to vote Democrat. Let's call it for what it is, a pre-emptive strike at stealing the 2024 election.

In Florida, the state legislature has taken a most unusual step, and allowed Governor Ron DeSantis to redistrict the state on his own, giving him unprecedented power. They then, of course, approved his scheme. Even though it is being challenged by several groups, the Florida Supreme Court is allowing it to be used for this cycle. The groups have said that they will not drop their lawsuit.

The Big Lie has given the GOP the opportunity to take authoritarian rule for a test drive, and every American should be alarmed by this nationwide assault on democracy.

“I’m not hiding my disgust, my disdain for your criminal offense. Arguably, you sold your country out. … In the White House! In the West Wing!”

-Federal Judge Emmett Sullivan

It should have been a warning shot about the lengths to which Flynn would go for Trump.

Michael Flynn was but one of the members of the military who attempted to lend credibility to The Big Lie. All of it is laid out in an exhaustive Reuters investigation which you can read here.

Flynn's accomplices include Phil Waldron, whose specialty was psychological operations (PSYOPs), Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Raiklin an intelligence officer who promoted the theory that Pence could overturn the election, and Seth Keshel, another intelligence contact who claimed to have created statistical models that prove the election was stolen. 

All of them collaborated on a series of lies that helped indoctrinate Trump's supporters into the belief that a massive conspiracy existed that resulted in the presidency being unjustly stolen from their leader. 

Of all, Flynn was the most well-known, but he shouldn't have been anyone to consider "credible" on any level. He pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about conversations he had with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. during Trump's transition into

the White House, and about his work lobbying for the Turkish government through a conduit as he worked on the Trump campaign and his transition team. Robert Mueller stopped short of charging Flynn with treason, although the judge in the case made no bones about the fact that he believed Flynn committed treason.

Trump pardoned General Flynn even before his sentencing took place absolving him of "any and all possible offenses" arising from Robert Mueller's investigation and from any and all grand jury proceedings. With his legal headaches gone, and his freedom from public service over, Michael Flynn became one of Trump's most loyal foot soldiers in spreading The Big Lie.

We have focused more on Michael Flynn elsewhere on this website. Please visit here.

Unfortunately, money in politics is a way of life here in the U.S. after the Citizens United ruling of 2010. Again, the Supreme Court was conservative at the time, although not a conservative supermajority like now. It is unlikely that this will ever be overturned in this version of the Supreme Court, and it is equally unlikely that a Constitutional amendment reversing the decision will happen. Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the decision the worst of any decision that was handed down while she was a sitting justice. The Brennan Center for Justice explains the ruling in this article.

One point must be made. It is true that both Democrats and Republicans take corporate donations. However, only one party has ever used that money to threaten democracy and overturn the will of the people. And it isn't the Democrats.

It took big money to fund the January 6 rally turned attempted coup. Let's call it for what it actually was. We've gone past the point of calling it a bunch of peaceful patriots who got carried away. We're also beyond calling the participants "political prisoners." It's clear that several corporate entities are comfortable with the idea of subverting the will of the people.

Richard Uihlein, the man behind Uline packaging, has contributed millions in recent years to the Tea Party Patriots, one of the planners behind the January 6 insurrection. His foundation has given $1.8 million to the Conservative Partnership Institute, who has supported The Big Lie with its election integrity summits. 

Peter Thiel is a man who helped to build Silicon Valley and big tech, but now wants to help build the 'new American right,' which essentially consists of eliminating "woke" politics. He has also expressed an interest in eliminating "the traitorous 10" who voted to impeach Trump. He has already given $20 million this cycle and is now focused on the 2022 midterms. 

Larry Ellison, founder and chairman of Oracle, joined a 2020 call strategizing about how to overturn the election. Also involved in the call was Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, a purveyor of The Big Lie.

Corporations also supported members of Congress, known as the "Sedition Caucus," to the tune of about $16 million. These corporations include UPS, FedEx, GM, Home Depot, Visa, AT&T and ExxonMobil. Recipients of their donations include Kevin McCarthy, Scott Perry, Jim Jordan, and Andy Biggs who were subpoenaed by the J6 Committee but refused to comply.

Our friend Judd Legum at Popular Information, whom we have profiled on our videos, has also been tracking donations to the Sedition Caucus.

Toyota has been pulling the wool over the public's eyes and flip flopping on their donations to the seditionists. They have stopped and started a few times now. Recipients of Toyota's cash include Congressmen David Kustoff (R-TN), Trent Kelly (R-MS), and Garret Graves (R-LA).

CREW, also known as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, has named Koch Industries, Boeing, Valero Energy, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Marathon Petroleum, and General Motors, among others, as donors to those who have supported Trump's Big Lie.

Let's not forget Trump's cadre of "dark money" groups who helped organize the rally. These are classified as 501 (c) (4) organizations and are not required to reveal their donors. Women for America First largely organized the insurrection.

America First Policies is another "dark money" group. They raised about $30 million from undisclosed donors in 2019. They were not involved in planning the rally, but a 2019 filing shows that they donated $25,000 to Women for America First.

You can read more about the organization of the J6 insurrection in this article.

Check back and keep track

You can follow the money yourself.

Accountable.us has a tracker that follows donations to seditionists.

Popular Info also has a Corporate Accountability Index.