Good morning. 
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 83. Sunrise is 5:29 AM and sunset 8:32 PM, for 15 h 02m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 12% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1973, Alexander Butterfield reveals the existence of a secret Oval Office taping system to investigators for the Senate Watergate Committee.
Recommended for reading in full —
Patrick Marley reports Wisconsin man who’s scanning ballots, conducting election review was convicted of fraud:
A small group of Wisconsinites conducting a review of the presidential election — including a felon convicted of fraud — hopes soon to scan ballots in Brown County.
The group of about a half dozen volunteers has collected images of about 2 million ballots using the state’s open records law, said Gary Wait, a former private investigator who is helping lead the effort. Those involved have visited two Dane County communities to scan ballots and examine them with microscopes.
Assisting Wait is Peter Bernegger of New London, who was convicted in 2009 of bank fraud and mail fraud. A federal judge in Mississippi sentenced him to 70 months in prison and ordered him to pay restitution of $2.1 million.
An appeals court upheld his conviction but lowered his restitution to $1.7 million. Bernegger has spent years fighting his conviction, filing numerous appeals.
Josh Dawsey reports The Republican Party’s top lawyer called election fraud arguments by Trump’s lawyers a ‘joke’ that could mislead millions:
Justin Riemer, the Republican National Committee’s chief counsel, sought to discourage a Republican Party staffer from posting claims about ballot fraud on RNC accounts, the email shows, as attempts by Donald Trump and his associates to challenge results in a number of states, such as Arizona and Pennsylvania, intensified.
“What Rudy and Jenna are doing is a joke and they are getting laughed out of court,” Riemer, a longtime Republican lawyer, wrote to Liz Harrington, a former party spokeswoman, on Nov. 28, referring to Trump attorneys Rudolph W. Giuliani and Jenna Ellis. “They are misleading millions of people who have wishful thinking that the president is going to somehow win this thing.”
Jamelle Bouie writes The Less Trump Pays for Jan. 6, the More It Costs Us:
For two months after the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump fought to invalidate and overturn the results. When election administrators and judges refused to play ball, he urged his most loyal followers to march on Congress, to prevent final certification of the electoral vote. “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” he told a crowd of thousands on Jan. 6.
“We’re going to the Capitol,” Trump said, and though he did not, many of his supporters did.
Trump was impeached for his leading role in the insurrection, but not convicted. The stain of that second impeachment notwithstanding, he left office without sanction. He lives in freedom, cushioned by continued wealth and influence. He still has the Republican Party in his thrall, and within that party, the only orthodoxy that matters is whether you also want to “stop the steal.” After a brief and uncharacteristic silence on this point, Trump now hails the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as heroes.
“These were peaceful people, these were great people,” he said during a recent interview on Fox News, in which he also embraced the MAGA martyrdom of Ashli Babbitt, who was killed inside the Capitol.
We are not the only democracy to have had a corrupt, would-be authoritarian in high office. But we have had a hard time holding that person minimally accountable, much less keeping him out of contention for future office, which would have been accomplished had he been removed from the White House.