What a kick it was, last week, to see Donald Trump suffer an anti-fascist trifecta.
The U.S. Supreme Court, including his three appointees, allowed the National Archives to release Trump’s coup d’etat documents – and we quickly learned (the first of many things we’ll learn) that his cadre drafted an executive order directing the Defense Department to seize voting machines. Meanwhile, New York State’s attorney general filed court papers alleging “significant evidence” that Trump has engaged in “fraudulent” business practices. And meanwhile, a district attorney in Atlanta requested a special grand jury to hear evidence that Trump, in his attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s Georgia victory, may well have subjected the state election process to “criminal disruptions.”
I know, I know. You’re asking yourself, “How’s he gonna worm out of it this time?”
But somehow – call me crazy – it does seem like we’re inching ever closer to critical mass, especially now that the Jan. 6 Committee is probing possible Trump regime links to the fake Trump elector slates, the outright forgeries, that were mailed to the National Archives and Congress. These days, every time state and federal investigators lift a new rock, they find more MAGAts.
And the most blatant example is what happened in Georgia, where it’s already well established that Trump personally took the lead. Let’s look closely at that special grand jury request; as Atlanta DA Fani Willis pointed out, such a panel “may make recommendations concerning criminal prosecution as it shall see fit.”
That may indeed be fitting, because four days before the Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington, Trump was caught, in a recorded phone call, demanding that Georgia’s top election official magically reverse the certified vote tally and award the state to Trump. At one point the loser said: “I have to find 12,000 votes” – just enough to reverse Biden’s winning margin. Trump told Brad Raffensperger, the election official, that the certified tally was corrupt (a lie) and that, therefore, Raffensperger was committing “a criminal offense” by refusing to expose the corruption (that didn’t exist).
Here we have Trump’s own words (legally recorded by Raffensperger), a master class in lying thuggery: “I think it’s pretty clear that we won. We won very substantially in Georgia…You’re not reporting (the purported corruption). That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense…I’m notifying you that you’re letting it happen. So look. All I want is to do this. I just want to find 11, 780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.”
The other day, in response to the DA’s special grand jury request, Trump crayoned a statement decreeing that his phone call to Raffensperger was “perfect, perhaps even more so than my call with the Ukrainian President, if that’s possible.” What was a fascinating defense. His 2019 call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky- pressuring Zelensky to launch a fake probe of the Biden family – triggered Trump’s first impeachment.
But that impeachment is ancient history. What he did in Georgia is serious business. David French, a conservative attorney who respects the rule of law, says it well: “Were Trump’s attempts to reverse the outcome in Georgia, and nationally, criminal? There is compelling evidence that they were, under both Georgia state law and federal criminal statutes…When you walk through the evidence of Trump’s brazen attempt to bully, threaten, and command subordinates and state officials to steal an election, his actions quite obviously demand a close criminal inquiry.”
A recent report by the Brookings Institution think tank – a report co-authored by a former Georgia prosecutor and county DA – lays out Trump’s “substantial risk” of criminal exposure in that state: “criminal solicitation to commit election fraud; intentional interference with performance of election duties; conspiracy to commit election fraud…and state RICO (racketeering) violations. Our conclusion is based entirely on publicly available reporting and evidence (and) a close reading of the relevant portions of Georgia’s legal code.” Georgia, says the report, was ground zero for the “most well-documented assault upon the 2020 election.”
And the “perfect” phone call to Raffensperger was just one of Trump’s many moves. A month earlier, on Dec. 5, 2020, he tried to pressure Georgia Gov. Brain Kemp into reversing his loss; when Kemp declined, Trump attacked him at a rally. On Dec. 23, he tried to pressure Raffensperger’s chief investigator. On Dec. 27, he told the Justice Department to intervene in Georgia, and uttered this gem: “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the (Republican) congressmen.” He also forced the resignation of a U.S. attorney in Georgia after the official failed to find any evidence of election fraud.
Given what we already know, is there even a need for more evidence? If the special grand jury is convened and criminal charges are recommended, we’ll likely get a lot more evidence anyway – because Willis, the DA, intends to subpoena a lot of people who thus far have refused to voluntarily cooperate.
And yet.
By now you have every right to be jaded.
Remember the cartoons that featured the luckless Wile E. Coyote? He never did catch the Road Runner.