With the handing down of the Georgia indictment, we now know the basic contour of former President Donald Trump’s criminality after the 2020 election. Special counsel Jack Smith may have
brought a narrower case under federal law while Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis (D)
pursued a broader case using Georgia’s RICO statute, but they both agree that Trump lost the 2020 election, lied about it and undertook a scheme to overturn the results.
That scheme — whether called a conspiracy or RICO — involved a group of Republican lawyers and others who first filed frivolous litigation and, when that didn’t work, eventually settled on submitting fake electors with the hope that state legislatures and the vice president would overstep their constitutional boundaries. Finally, it led to the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol.
These indictments are critical to our system of justice and the rule of law. But they cover only a fraction of the damage Trump and his allies have done to our system of elections. The indictments only cover a snapshot in time. To present their cases to a jury, prosecutors need to tell a story of criminality with a beginning and an end.
The Georgia indictment claims that Trump began his conspiracy on Nov. 4, 2020 — the day after the 2020 general election. The Washington, D.C. grand jury pegged the date as ten days later, on Nov. 14, 2020. Both indictments agree that the illegal conduct began after the election.
But the specific legal charges do not define the underlying conduct, only its prescribed penalty. We should not allow the criminal law to cramp our understanding of how corrosive Trump was before the 2020 election and how dangerous he remains today. The criminal law may set the outer boundaries of what can be punished but it does not define the parameters of harm to individuals and to society.
The truth is that Trump has never believed in free and fair elections. When he considered running for president in 2012, Trump became the leading proponent of “birtherism” — the racist conspiracy theory that former President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
Before the 2016 election, he
claimed that it “is absolutely being rigged.” He
decried that Republican leaders were not doing enough to combat “large scale voter fraud.” He used his very first meeting with congressional leadership as president to
falsely tell them that “millions of unauthorized immigrants had robbed him of a popular vote majority.”
The run up to the 2020 election was even worse. Though the indictments only charge Trump with conspiring to illegally overturn the results after Election Day, the reality is that he started much earlier.
(full article online)
From Marc | Trump has converted the entire GOP into an anti-democracy machine spewing hate and disinformation.
www.democracydocket.com