MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace said, “there are dots that can be connected between the things he says and the things bad people do,” while discussing President Donald Trump’s tweets’ influence on an FBI thwarted plot to violently overthrow the Michigan state government by kidnapping Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI).
Friday on her show “Deadline,” Wallace said, “I think what the foiled plot against Gretchen Whitmer maybe makes real is that the tweets are acted upon sometimes. Whether they’re cause and effect, I think that’s a question only law enforcement can answer, but there are dots that can be connected between the things he says and the things bad people do. I want to read you this from Politico. ‘Trump campaign ready to unleash thousands of poll watchers on election day. The campaign has established what it says is a 50,000 plus army of volunteer observers across an array of battleground states like North Carolina and Pennsylvania where operations are already underway. Poll watchers monitor everything from voting machines to the processing of ballots to checking voter ID. They’re not permitted to interact directly with voters, but they can relay problems to local election officials or campaign higher-ups.’ Now there is sort of a civic piece of poll watchers and some history of it, but that is not the vain in which Donald Trump is talking about a 50,000-plus army, is it?”
MSNBC’s Jason Johnson replied, “No, no, and that’s very much connected to what we saw in Michigan this week. The president is raising an illegal white nationalist terrorist army that he wants to go out there and intimidate people, so we have both the legal and the extra-legal. From the legal standpoint, we see things like what just happened in Wisconsin where the Milwaukee Bucks had actually agreed with NBA players to turn their arena into a polling station that will be useful during the pandemic, and then they had to shut it down because Republicans said, ‘Well it’s technically past the deadline so any ballots that are in that location if you vote there, will invalidate everything at that polling station.'”
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