My Turn: Trump was Right
Trump was right about election fraud: Guess who’ll be doing the perp walk
In the months leading up to the 2020 election, Donald Trump claimed on numerous occasions that the 2020 election would be rigged against him. His anguished cries of election fraud greatly increased in frequency and intensity following the election. But the mainstream media and election officials, both Republican and Democrat, refused to countenance those pitiful pleas for help.
Neither were the courts of assistance, declining to find election fraud or impropriety in over 60 lawsuits brought by Trump’s intrepid followers. Trump’s Attorney General, FBI Director, cyber experts, Supreme Court appointees, and numerous other government functionaries, declined to give credibility to his grievous supplications. Trump beseeched state and local officeholders in a number of states to find fraud and overturn the election results, only to be rebuffed on every occasion.
The answer was always the same--there was no evidence of significant election fraud or irregularity, certainly not enough to change the outcome in any of the six states identified by Trump. That all changed on the second day of the New Year.
Trump’s oft-repeated and unheeded assertions of election fraud were backed by unimpeachable evidence, placed on the record for all to hear, by Trump himself on January 2. In a one-hour telephone call with the Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, Trump urged the SOS to “find” 11,780 extra votes for him, which would give Trump just one more vote than Joe Biden.
Okay, so this may seem to be a fairly clear-cut violation of Georgia law, specifically Georgia Code section 21-2-604 which makes it a crime to solicit someone else to commit election fraud. This certainly appears to be out-and-out election fraud--a person urging an election official to change the election outcome to give the person just enough votes to surmount a rival’s victory.
However, Trump’s crack legal team, Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell, etc., would likely point out that Trump’s offense was merely “solicitation” of election fraud, not fraud itself. And they might further note that Trump was not being greedy--he just wanted one more vote than Biden, not thousands. On the other hand, Trump could have reached his objective, not by manufacturing Trump votes but, by switching 5,890 actual Biden votes to Trump’s column. Nevertheless, it would still be a violation of the Georgia statute and, unfortunately, a state offense not pardonable under the U.S. Constitution.
Trump’s transgression would likely implicate certain federal criminal statutes, but those might be amenable to a presidential pardon, if a self-pardon is legal under the Constitution. But let’s not get off on that tangent.
Back to the subject at hand, it is now obvious that Trump’s impassioned cries of fraud have been vindicated. All of those who pooh-poohed them should apologize, because we now have proof positive that there was an unlawful effort to change the election outcome in at least one state--Georgia. It is time for the authorities to step in and bring the culprit to justice. Will the orange Georgia prison garb clash, or sync, with his complexion?
Trump phone call with Raffensperger:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-raffensperger-call-georgia-vote/2021/01/03/d45acb92-4dc4-11eb-bda4-615aaefd0555_story.html
Georgia election law:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/01/03/investigation-law-trump-georgia-phone-call/
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Jim Jones is a former Idaho Supreme Court Justice and attorney general. Jim’s columns can be found at JJCommonTater.com.