Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said arrest warrants had been issued for Trump and the others charged over their efforts to overturn the 2020 election and they had until August 25 to “voluntarily surrender.” (Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA and Christian MONTERROSA / AFP) (Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA,CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA/AFP via Getty Images)
August 21, 2023
Prosecutors have indicted former President Donald Trump four times in four months on the eve of the start of the 2024 political campaign for acts committed 2 1/2 years ago. On Thursday, in Georgia, Trump is facing his latest arrest, where law enforcement will fingerprint him, require a $200,000 bond, and disgracefully even take a mug shot.
No sentient American believes that these dubious, at best, charges against former and possibly future President Trump are not politically motivated.
Republicans knew if Trump ran for reelection in 2024, the left would again attempt to destroy him. But imprisoning him for life is a new floor beyond what even the left’s harshest critics could have imagined.
The latest indictment in Georgia consists of 41 sprawling counts and names 18 other defendants, many of whom were Trump’s attorneys and members of his administration. The abrogation of attorney-client privilege and the chilling effect on asserting a constitutional right to contest future elections is frightening and should concern every American.
Further, the odds that Trump and the other defendants will receive a fair trial with an impartial jury are slim. Fulton County is 90% Democratic, and DA Fani Willis is a hard-core partisan fundraising off her efforts to imprison Trump.
The Georgia DA charged Trump and his fellow defendants with attempting to subvert the 2020 election under a state anti-organized crime law known as RICO- Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Prosecutors put Mafia godfather John Gotti away for life under RICO. Incredibly, the indictment compares Trump and the other 18 charged with organized crime, referring to them as a “criminal enterprise”.
Besides the fact that it is a ludicrous stretch to compare Trump to a mob boss, RICO involves a state of mind, a knowing agreement to commit a fraudulent act. In other words, the legitimacy of the 2020 election is not relevant, but did Trump and company believe it was illegitimate?
Trump’s State of Mind
There is zero public evidence that Trump ever stated he knew he lost the election. Even Mike Pence, who has been critical of Trump post-2020, stated to the Des Moines Register:
“There was no point in time that the president told me he knew he had lost [the election].”
A look back at how the left weaponized the government against Trump during both the 2016 presidential campaign and his presidency provides ample reason for the priming of Trump’s state of mind to believe the left used their power to alter the election in Biden’s favor.
Recall in 2016, so desperate to prevent Trump from becoming president, the FBI fabricated and obscured information on FISA warrants to spy on and entrap members of his campaign and administration. In collusion with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, they also promoted the Trump-Russian collusion narrative- what we now know as the Russian collusion hoax. During his tenure as president, the powerful within the US government corruptly attempted to overturn the 2020 election with multiple investigations, lacking a legitimate predicate, and constant unflattering leaks of information.
Democratic lawmakers even resorted to dubiously impeaching Trump twice – First over a phone call, the second over January 6. Powerful “Never Trumpers”, using unethical and illegal means to remove him from office hamstrung Trump’s entire presidency.
Then in 2020, using Covid as a pretext, Democrats changed voting laws favoring Biden -universal mail-in balloting, extended early voting periods, allowed ballot harvesting, and installed unmanned drop boxes. Many believe the changes made violated respective state constitutions.
Another possibly corrupting factor in the 2020 election was a nonprofit called the Center for Technology and Civic Life, funded by Biden supporter and liberal Democrat Mark Zuckerberg, which gave $350 million to local voting precincts. An analysis by the Captial Research Center found CTCL “consistently gave bigger grants and more money per capita to counties that voted for Biden”. Its tally for Georgia shows average grants of $1.41 per head in Trump areas and $5.33 in Biden ones.
The nature of all these changes made voting fraud significantly easier to commit and significantly harder to detect. But, it does not matter if smoking gun evidence of voter fraud materialized, there is ample evidence to show Trump and his associates believed the election was not on the level.
Further, according to former law professor and legal scholar Alan Dershowitz, the RICO case in Georgia is “very weak and very dangerous” and could have been applied to him and other attorneys who represented Al Gore in contesting the election against George W. Bush in 2000.
“Fake Electors” Fallacy
Dershowitz explains the first thing that occurs when protesting an election is to present a slate of “alternate electors”- what Willis and the mainstream media have ominously dubbed “fake electors”. Dershowitz adds, in 2000, he and his associates used “many tactics similar to those employed in 2020” by Trump and his now-fellow defendants… “including proposing a slate of alternate electors” who would deliver their preferred election results… “no one was indicted, disbarred, disciplined or even much criticized for their efforts…”
Moreover, while certifying Trump’s presidential election in 2017, House Democrats from multiple states objected to electoral vote counts 11 times. Outspoken Trump critic and one of the House impeachment managers against Trump, Rep. Jaime Raskin of Maryland, rose to object to 10 of Florida’s 29 electoral votes- aka present “fake electors”. No doubt, the hypocrisy is lost on him.
Also left out of the discussion by those making the case against Trump is that those on both sides of the aisle admitted that the Electoral Count Act, which Trump and his attorneys claimed gave Vice President Pence the power to reject electoral votes, was open to interpretation. As evidence that Congress did not believe Trump’s and his attorneys’ argument regarding electors was baseless, after the January 6 debacle they passed the bipartisan “Electoral Count Reform Act” defining the rules of selecting electors and the role of the Vice President.
Phone call
A so-called smoking gun in the indictment is Trump’s phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, captured in an audio recording. During the conversation, Trump asked Raffensberger to “find 11,780 votes”. At the time, Trump was loudly claiming fraud citing corrupted voting machines, drop boxes, and mail-in voting.
To date, Trump has never wavered from his belief that his opponents rigged the election against him, nor has anyone in his inner circle come forward claiming Trump knew he lost. Clearly, Trump was asking Raffenberger to locate votes fraudulently not counted for him- not manufacture votes. In other words, Trump was petitioning his government to redress a grievance – a constitutionally protected right.
Unequal Justice
Reaching into the oval office, abrogating executive and attorney-client privilege, and criminalizing: political speech, legal strategies, and following the advice of attorneys is a slippery slope that goes against core American values. Even the prosecutors doggedly pursuing Trump must know their actions are antithetical to the health of our republic. Unfortunately, hatred for Trump supersedes their oath to uphold the rule of law.
No one believes that Trump would be in such legal peril (based on all the charges, Trump is facing a 700-plus-year prison sentence) if he did not announce his candidacy for president in 2024.
“Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime”-
an infamous quote by Joseph Stalin’s chief of the secret police, is an apt depiction of the criminal pursuit of former President Trump.
Thanks to the powerful on the political left, our country is no better than a Soviet-era police state.
