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Trump admin alums to launch 'Center for Election Integrity'

18 August 2021
Dan Ackermann

The America First Policy Institute, led by Trump administration alumni, on Thursday will announce a Center for Election Integrity, a nonprofit group it says will push policies in state legislatures to "help make it easy to vote, but hard to cheat."

Driving the news: CEI will hold a morning announcement event at Atlanta Metropolitan Cathedral, a nod to Georgia's swing-state status as a hotbed of election controversy.

What they're saying: Hogan Gidley, a former White House spokesman and the center's director, said CEI "will work tirelessly to protect the voters and safeguard the integrity of future elections because one illegal vote is one too many.”

  • The group aims to support voter ID requirements and to "require ballots to be returned by election day...ensure voter rolls are consistently cleaned and kept up to date...and litigate cases of voter fraud."
  • CEI chairman Ken Blackwell, a former Ohio secretary of state, said in a statement: "We must help make sure that people have confidence in our system and that we give citizens a fair vote count."

Reality check: Although election security is a hot issue with Republicans, even Bill Barr, who was attorney general under President Trump, said he saw no evidence of widespread election fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

  • And more than half of Americans are "more concerned about laws restricting voting access than making sure that no one who is ineligible votes," according to recent polling.
  • Meanwhile, hundreds of bills aimed at restricting voter access at the polls have been proposed across the country.

Transcripts show George Floyd told police "I can't breathe" over 20 times

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Newly released transcripts of bodycam footage from the Minneapolis Police Department show that George Floyd told officers he could not breathe more than 20 times in the moments leading up to his death.

Why it matters: Floyd's killing sparked a national wave of Black Lives Matter protests and an ongoing reckoning over systemic racism in the United States. The transcripts "offer one the most thorough and dramatic accounts" before Floyd's death, The New York Times writes.

The state of play: The transcripts were released as former officer Thomas Lane seeks to have the charges that he aided in Floyd's death thrown out in court, per the Times. He is one of four officers who have been charged.

  • The filings also include a 60-page transcript of an interview with Lane. He said he "felt maybe that something was going on" when asked if he believed that Floyd was having a medical emergency at the time.

What the transcripts say:

  • Floyd told the officers he was claustrophobic as they tried to get him into the squad car.
  • The transcripts also show Floyd saying, "Momma, I love you. Tell my kids I love them. I'm dead."
  • Former officer Derek Chauvin, who had his knee on Floyd's neck for over eight minutes, told Floyd, "Then stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk."

Read the transcripts via DocumentCloud.