RAGA Hires Back Their Jan. 6 Fall Guy
The Republican Attorneys General Association announced today that they would be bringing back the executive director involved in assisting Trump with the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol.
The Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) has just announced that former Executive Director, Adam Piper, who resigned in the aftermath January 6, 2021, was rehired by the organization and re-established in his role on Friday. Piper, who worked in that position from 2018 until early 2021, resigned after Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol following a robocall promotion of the event from the RAGA organization.
The following is a SHERO article, which details the significant role RAGA has played in helping to elect Republicans who would push the Conservative Trump agenda, which included reversing Roe v. Wade. It details all of the controversial aspects of Piper’s tenure, including the RAGA role in overturning abortion rights and Piper’s willingness to take the blame when RAGA was implicated in the January 6th insurrection.
The Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) is Dangerous
(originally published on June 19, 2022)
Over a gorgeous weekend in the summer of 2022, the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) began to host a private retreat for major corporate donors at the opulent Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. The luxury event, which ran for several days, included over 20 corporations and trade groups, including lobbyists and executives from Comcast, Match Group, General Motors, Johnson & Johnson, Anheuser-Busch, Juul Labs, Koch Industries, Lowe’s and Walmart.
The event, titled ERC & Victory Fund Retreat, was hosted just weeks after a Conservative Majority on the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. RAGA undoubtedly used this fancy retreat to seek more donations in the continuing effort to fend off ongoing legal attacks concerning the protection of abortion rights. According to a group fundraising email from June 24, “every donation [to the RAGA fund goes to] help the Republican Attorneys General combat the Democrats’ pro-abortion agenda and stand tall for life.”
Since the 2020 election cycle, almost all the corporations listed to attend this private retreat contributed a combined $4 million to the Republican Attorneys General Association — this amount was collected in the first quarter of 2022 alone. Several of these companies play both sides of the field and donate heavily to Democratic causes as well. Since the recent landmark ruling overturning Roe, Comcast and Match Group both publicly announced that they would cover travel costs for employees who have to travel out of state for abortions.
We saw how RAGA sprang into action when it was publicly made known that a 10-year-old girl in Ohio, who had been raped and impregnated, traveled to Indiana to receive a medical abortion. The Republican Indiana Attorney General, Todd Rokita, launched an all-out legal and public relations attack on the child’s medical provider that culminated in extremist threats to Dr. Cailtin Bernard’s own daughter.
Dr. Bernard, who performed the procedure on the 10-year-old rape victim, was one of six doctors named on the website of extreme anti-abortion group Right to Life Michianain a section entitled “Local Abortion Threat.” Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett has been linked to this extremist group since at least 2006, when both she and her husband signed their names to a treatise published by the group in the South Bend Tribune. The Coney-Barrett endorsed open letter demanded an end to Roe v. Wade and referred to the legal precedent established by the case as “barbaric.”
Dr. Bernard stated last year that she had stopped performing first-trimester abortions at a clinic in South Bend, Indiana, after the FBI had alerted Planned Parenthood of a threat to kidnap her daughter made by this extremist Right to Life group endorsed by Coney-Barrett.
Indiana’s Republican Attorney General intentionally shifted his attention to Dr. Bernard in an attempt to retaliate by further damaging her career and putting her family in more jeopardy. On July 6, Rokita appeared on Fox News and vowed to investigate the obstetrician-gynecologist, suggesting the doctor may have engaged in criminal misconduct (see video below).
Rokita issued a written statement a day later, questioning whether the physician followed reporting requirements. “The failure to do so constitutes a crime in Indiana,” Rokita’s statement added. A few hours later, the Fox affiliate in Indianapolis reportedthat Bernard “not only filed a terminated-pregnancy report but filed the report within the required timeframe.”
The outlet’s report was based on records obtained through a routine public records request — a step the Indiana attorney general’s office could have easily taken before Rokita started accusing the doctor of wrongdoing. Rokita also raised the prospect of a possible HIPAA violation, but Indiana University Health officials concluded that Dr. Bernard did not violate any privacy laws.
An attorney for Dr. Bernard sent a cease-and-desist letter last Friday to Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita citing comments he made regarding Bernard on Fox News Channel Wednesday night. "Your false and defamatory statements to Fox News on July 13, 2022, cast Dr. Bernard in a false light and allege misconduct in her profession," Bernard’s attorney wrote.
A spokesperson for Rokita's office responded by saying merely that the letter will be reviewed when it arrives but "no false or misleading statements have been made." Whether or not this is determined to be appropriate, legally, remains to be seen and there is no information at this point about any civil charges by Dr. Bernard against the Indiana Attorney General’s Office.
This is far from the first time that the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) has involved itself in the systematic attack on human rights in the United States. There are links to RAGA and the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol.
On January 5, 2021, the night before the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol Building, an elite meeting supposedly took place at the private residence of the president at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC, just blocks away from the White House. According to the social media posts of failed Nebraska Gubernatorial Candidate Charles W. Herbster, several influential arms of the Republican Party were involved, including Sen. Tommy Tuberville and RAGA. You can read more about this in my article from Jan. 27, 2021, entitled Tuberville and RAGA Now Directly Implicated in Trump's Coup.
It is clear that the Republican Attorneys General Association is well entrenched in politics and has been working for years to destroy the abortion rights granted by Roe v. Wade. But their latest moves include involving themselves with an attempted coup of the federal government and using their political power to attack an abortion provider who has broken no laws, reflecting an even more emboldened brazenness that is frightening.
Add to that RAGA’s major corporate donations from companies that support RAGA’s actions, all funded by your own patronage, and we have an alarming reality: in addition to the new law helping to facilitate statewide abortion bans, RAGA now has the money and desire to pursue retaliatory attacks on professionals and citizens whose ideologies oppose theirs.
Amee Vanderpool writes the SHERO Newsletter and is an attorney, published author, contributor to newspapers and magazines, and analyst for BBC radio. She can be reached at avanderpool@gmail.com or follow her on Twitter @girlsreallyrule.
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God, how I despise these horrible Handmaiden-esque authoritarians.