I just wanted to pop in and recommend this week’s Frontline. It walks through the Election Interference case against Trump in clear detail and presents it in a way that really connects all the dots. While I never doubted that Trump tried to overturn the election, I also never realized just how damning some of the evidence and testimony is. For instance, in the call with Raffensperger Trump (IMO) stops just short of clearly asking anyone to break the law.
But now I learn that when asking the acting AG (after Barr left) to declare the election rife with problems, they have testified that they told him that wasn’t true, and Trump said (paraphrasing) “I don’t care, I just need you to SAY it was true” Which is seems like an overt criminal intent to me.
Frontline Democracy on Trial. Really worth a watch.
(Mods, I put this in P&E because I suspect that any other forum would not appreciate the Trump Pollution)
“So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.” — Donald Trump to Brad Ragfensperger
Seems like as clear a case of attempted election tampering and intimidation as you could get without Trump (hypothetically) following with, “Either the votes or your brains will be on the table.” That the Republican party leadership and much of their voter rolls either don’t think this or just don’t care is what is putting the viability of American democracy in serious peril.
I am confident that Trump wanted the votes manufactured. But I also think, in front of a jury, the defense that “I wasn’t asking him to manufacture the votes. I was asking him to do his job and find the fraud, which I know occurred, because I know I really won” will reach the standard of reasonable doubt with at least a couple of jurors.
Agree, but I think the prosecution could bring into evidence Trump’s track record of lies and making thing up to counter the whole “…but I believed it, so it must be true…” defense. If the Trump team can produce some form of evidence that shows the election was fraught with fraud, he may have some supporting argument, but so far they haven’t produced it. In the real world, not Trump’s fantasy world, just “believing” something without evidence doesn’t make it true.
Its not what people believe, its what they reasonably believe. In the “I thought he had a gun” example, the person would have state why they thought he had a gun. “I just did” wouldn’t suffice. IMHO, Trump has failed miserably in providing ANY reason to believe the election was stolen. Quite the opposite. He was given (by his own people) every reason to believe that he lost, fair and square.
I mentioned this documentary in another thread. While I doubt it will change any minds, its worth watching the whole thing. Any person with critical thinking skills can come to only one conclusion. Of course, this leaves out most, if not all, MAGAs.
The problem with that argument is that Trump wasn’t just saying, “I think some voter or election fraud was occurring; please delay finalizing the count until you investigate,” which is a dubious but sufficiently ambiguous claim that could be rationalized as coming from a place of genuine belief; he was telling the Georgia Secretary of State to “find” him the specific number of votes to ensure electoral victory in the state and grant him those 16 Electoral College votes without even alleged evidence. There is no ambiguity in the intent of this statement.
Unfortunately, you are correct that this argument would likely no convince a jury because out of a random selection of 12 adults you are likely to find 2 or 3 who will claim the belief that “the election was stolen” and would find some daylight for “‘reasonable’ doubt” to refuse to come to a conviction. It is this—not just Trump’s 2016 Electoral College victory, or his strong but inarguably losing performance in the 2020 election—that has democracy on life support in the United States, and while Trump inspires that devotion in his followers, he didn’t begin this process and has probably never thought substantially about voter denial and manipulating elections until somebody suggested it to him. (Other than, of course, in 2016 when he disputed the integrity of his own election to claim that there were 5 million illegal voters who in his mind cost him the popular election even though he won the only tally that counted in the Electoral College.)
I wish the documentary could have gone into more detail about the confrontation between Michael Flynn, Sydney Powell vs the legal team over the prospect of declaring martial law. If Trump sincerely thought the election had been stolen, could anyone have talked him out of it? Or was it a bluff that was too extreme because it could result in physical danger to himself?
If a jury decides a “reasonable person” would be in fear of life and limb in a particular situation then it might work. The phone call isn’t the alpha and omega of the prosecution’s case, it’s simply one piece. They’re going to argue that Trump knew he lost the election and was aware there was no widespread fraud. Even if a reasonable person might have believed there was fraud, that doesn’t explain or excuse false electors.
I appreciated the well-deserved screen time from some of my favorite online legal commentators, including Quinta Jurecic of Lawfare and Ken White (aka Popehat).
I watched this because of the discussion here on the board. It was excellent.
While I didn’t learn anything new, I thought the way the information was organized and presented really walks anyone who watches it through the total orchestration of Trump’s criminal plan to steal the election from President Biden. And of course many of the narrators are – or at least were – Republicans.
I watched it yesterday. Frontline is so great! Yeah, it was not a lot of new info, but reinforces what took place and lays out the series of events pretty well in a more condensed version of the J6 Committee hearings. I have a hard time understanding how people who have seen this come to alternate conclusions here. But, I suppose it’s those same people who would not touch this documentary with a 10-foot pole.
Frontline covers the call pretty well, more than just the sound bite - not sure of the full transcript. It really puts a light on what was going on with the “perfect” call, and paints Raffensberger as a hero and Patriot, as well as Rusty Bowers, the SoS in Arizona. You may disagree with these guys on just about everything, but they held their oaths to the Constitution and to the country and showed real, true leadership under immense pressure.
Heroes true. They closed inner city polling stations and purged voters who’d been gentrified to different neighborhoods and outlawed handing out water to voters waiting under the same sun their ancestors had been allowed water while picking cotton, but when it crossed over to where the fig leaf of legality couldn’t shield them, it’s a regular Profile in Courage.