Trump's Georgia Indictment Raises Familiar Questions of Knowledge and Intent
The defendants will claim their alleged "racketeering activity" was a sincere effort to rectify election fraud.
The Georgia indictment that was unveiled last night charges former President Donald Trump and 18 other defendants with participating in an "enterprise" that engaged in a pattern of "racketeering activity" aimed at an illegal result: keeping Trump in office after he was defeated by Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. By relying on Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown notes, Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis was able to connect "a lot of related and relatively unrelated conduct"—including 161 listed actions—by "a bunch of disparate people, some acting directly in concert with Trump and his legal team and some much further removed."
Georgia's RICO law, as interpreted by state courts, is even broader than the famously flexible federal version, covering many more "predicate offenses," defining "enterprise" very loosely, and prescribing a weaker test for establishing a pattern of racketeering activity. The indictment nevertheless hinges on debatable interpretations of specific conduct that Willis portrays as part of a criminal conspiracy but the defendants will characterize as legitimate efforts to rectify what they perceived as systematic election fraud. As with the federal indictment of Trump that was unsealed earlier this month, which covers much of the same territory, the choice between those dueling descriptions will depend largely on how a jury views each defendant's knowledge and intent.
In addition to the RICO charges, each defendant is charged with at least one independently illegal act. Trump himself is charged with 12 of those underlying offenses.
Count 28, for example, alleges that Trump solicited a felony during the notorious January 2, 2021, telephone conversation in which he urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" the 12,000 or so votes that would be necessary to reverse Biden's victory in that state. The felony that Trump wanted Raffensperger to commit, according to the indictment, was "violation of oath" by a "public officer," and intentional solicitation of that crime is also a felony.
That is a plausible interpretation of Trump's conversation with Raffensperger, during which he floated one debunked election-fraud claim after another and seemed impervious to Raffensperger's refutations. Trump also suggested that Raffensperger could be criminally liable if he failed to do what Trump asked.
Trump, of course, argues that, far from encouraging Raffensperger to violate his oath, he was asking him to do his job by addressing supposedly credible fraud allegations. The question is not just whether those allegations were in fact credible (they were not, as Raffensperger pointed out repeatedly) but also whether Trump truly believed they were. When you read the transcript of that conversation, it is hard to tell.
Similarly, Count 27 charges that Trump knowingly filed a false document, also a felony, when he submitted a December 31, 2020, complaint as part of his lawsuit challenging the election results in Georgia. Among other things, that document falsely claimed that Georgia had counted votes from "as many as 2,506 felons with an uncompleted sentence," "at least 66,247 underage" people, "at least 2,423" unregistered voters, "at least 1,043" people with P.O. boxes listed as their addresses, and "as many as 10,315 or more" dead people.
Did Trump know those claims were inaccurate when he endorsed them? There is some evidence that he did. During litigation over access to Trump lawyer John Eastman's emails by the House select committee that investigated the 2021 Capitol riot, a federal judge noted that Eastman, in a December 30, 2020, email, "relayed 'concerns' from President Trump's team 'about including specific numbers in the paragraph dealing with felons, deceased, moved, etc.'"
The next day, Eastman elaborated on those concerns: "Although the President signed a verification for [a state court filing] back on Dec. 1, he has since been made aware that some of the allegations (and evidence proffered by the experts) has been inaccurate. For him to sign a new verification with that knowledge (and incorporation by reference) would not be accurate."
Trump apparently was unfazed. "President Trump and his attorneys ultimately filed the complaint with the same inaccurate numbers without rectifying, clarifying, or otherwise changing them," U.S. District Judge David O. Carter wrote. "President Trump, moreover, signed a verification swearing under oath that the incorporated, inaccurate numbers 'are true and correct' or 'believed to be true and correct' to the best of his knowledge and belief."
In other words, Carter said, "the emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public." Carter concluded that the messages therefore were "sufficiently related to and in furtherance of a conspiracy to defraud the United States," making them available to the House committee under the "crime-fraud exception" to attorney-client privilege and the work product doctrine.
The "more likely than not" standard that Carter applied in that case, however, is much less demanding than the proof beyond a reasonable doubt required for a criminal conviction. Eastman (who is one of Trump's co-defendants) said Trump had been "made aware" that the claims about ballots cast by dead people, felons, and unregistered voters were "inaccurate." But even if someone told him the numbers were wrong, and even if Trump was paying attention, it would have been perfectly in character for him to continue believing them.
The federal indictment is filled with examples of information that Trump ignored or rejected because it conflicted with his stolen-election narrative. That stubborn resistance can be interpreted either as evidence of his dishonesty or as evidence of his longstanding tendency to embrace self-flattering delusions and never let them go.
During his conversation with Raffensperger, which happened two days after the complaint cited in the indictment was filed, Trump again claimed that many "dead people voted" in Georgia. "I think the number is close to 5,000 people," he said. That estimate was less than half as big as the number cited in his own lawsuit, which gives you a sense of how little attention he paid to such details. "The actual number [was] two," Raffensperger said. "So that's wrong."
At a certain point, as George Mason law professor Ilya Somin suggests, willful blindness to reality is hard to distinguish from deliberate deceit, and this example vividly illustrates that point. But in assessing Trump's state of mind when he made unsubstantiated claims like these, a jury will have to decide whether there is reasonable doubt as to whether he knew they were false.
Counts 3 and 24, which allege that Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani knowingly made false statements when he testified before the Georgia Senate Judiciary Committee in December 2020, raise similar questions. During a December 3 hearing, the indictment notes, Giuliani asserted that at least 96,600 mail-in ballots were counted in Georgia's election "despite there being no record of those ballots having been returned to a county elections office." He also claimed that a Dominion Voting Systems machine in Michigan had "mistakenly recorded 6,000 votes for Joseph R. Biden when the votes were actually cast for Donald Trump." On December 30, Giuliani testified that "2,560 felons voted illegally," that "10,315 dead people voted," and that "Fulton County election workers fraudulently counted certain ballots as many as five times at State Farm Arena."
Giuliani recently admitted, in response to a defamation lawsuit by two of those election workers, that his claims about them "were false." But it is still possible that he accepted the story at the time. Giuliani certainly acted as if he sincerely believed what he was saying, which is why he seemed more like a deranged crackpot than a calculating con man. Maybe it was all pretense, but I think that may give Giuliani too much credit.
Several of the counts in the indictment, alleging offenses such as forgery, false statements, and solicitation of a felony, are related to the "alternate" electors scheme that Trump's lawyers and allies executed in Georgia and other battleground states. Under that plan, Republican nominees for the Electoral College met on December 16, voted, and presented themselves as "duly elected and qualified," contrary to the certified outcome.
There is a colorable argument, based on the precedent set by the 1960 dispute over Hawaii's electoral votes, that signing those certificates was a legitimate way to preserve the Trump campaign's options in light of its pending state lawsuit. The idea, as presented by Trump's lawyers, was that the "contingent" electors would be counted only in the (extremely unlikely) event that the lawsuit was successful.
That is how former Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer, who oversaw the meeting of Trump electors, explained it at the time. Shafer, one of Trump's 18 co-defendants, insists he was not aware of any plans to go further by pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to recognize the "alternate" slate instead of Biden's when he oversaw the congressional tally of electoral votes on January 6, 2021. While Shafer may or may not be telling the truth, the question of whether the would-be electors accepted the rationale offered by Trump's legal team certainly seems relevant in assessing their intent.
Trump's lawsuit, which was filed on December 4, may have been little more than an excuse to recruit the "alternate" electors and thereby create the impression that there was reason to doubt whether Biden had actually won. Like many of the charges against Trump and his allies, that conclusion depends on the premise that they cynically pursued claims they knew had no basis in fact. But judging from the evidence we have seen so far, it seems plausible that at least some of the defendants, possibly including Trump himself, were true believers in his lost cause.
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Go fuck yourself.
This just in: Orange Man Bad. More at 11.
I can’t stand Trump. But it would take me 60 seconds to acquit him of the charge if this was the only evidence. He makes numerous allegations of voting irregularities that he wants fixed. Not once does he ask for vote-manipulation.
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Jacob, look at where you cunts in media will be once you’ve weaponized legal speech like this. You are State propagandists so you better fucking pray the State never changes hands or else your willful ignorance and lies can be cast as a conspiracy just like you are doing here. You’ll deserve the rope for it too.
It’s pretty hilarious for the group who just spent 4 years playacting as THERESISTANCE to demand government censorship.
Remember the part where the DA’s office publicly posted the indictment on their website before the grand jury voted on the charges?
https://twitter.com/theblaze/status/1691146219777585152
Then the bailiff and judge hamming it up with reporters in a mock celebration.
They said it was a fake document, then today said it was a ‘trial run’.
They’ve been caught.
Their response: “So what?”
They’re not wrong to laugh at being held responsible for their harassment of The Swamp’s #1 enemy.
What of it?
Here Mike admits he doesn’t understand the judicial process.
Yeah, why bother with the jury anyway?
https://twitter.com/TheLastRefuge2/status/1691569883635425760?t=HxlfL86WjCqtfviTkUIRlg&s=19
lol… When you are in a hole… The totally random trial run, that took place before the grand jury vote, just happened to include a totally random but identical set of charges, in the exact same sequence, as the final indictment that was released after the grand jury vote…
[Link]
Is there any interest in prosecutorial abuses at this rag anymore? Never a criticism?
I thought you wingnuts didn’t believe there was prosecutorial misconduct anymore?
Because, you know.
Soros.
That makes zero sense jeff.
You agree with Soros that prosecutors are overzealous.
“prosecutorial abuses” – you and Soros think alike.
Soros prosecutors are over zealous against political rivals, yes. But they also push the false diversionary tactics of releasing violent criminals to cause regional and urban chaos.
You again make no sense jeff.
Standard prosecution of crimes is not an abuse.
What Jack Smith and other DAs inventing novel criminalization to go after opponents and do things like end legal privileges, lie to courts, etc are.
Youre not very smart jeff.
Soros objects to drug related prosecutions. The non-violent prison population here in the US is shameful.
If you had an ounce of libertarianism in you it would be obvious. But you don’t.
You cheer police brutality and asset theft like any other conservative does.
That’s weird, the Soros-backed DA here in St. Louis got tossed out on her butt for releasing (or refusing to prosecute) violent criminals, based on racial quotas.
People were actually hurt and killed by these policies. The public objected. Other Left-wing Democrats in office objected.
Sarah Palin’s Buttplug 2 4 hours ago
Flag Comment Mute User
Woah! What the fuck is going on here. I’ve snagged the pedo’s nick.
I was busy tormenting the kids tied up in my basement and forgot to switch socks back to prevent it getting snagged.
Lol
“Don’t forget about the tranny dancing.”
Seems like nobody has a problem with forgetting about tranny dancing except the far left and the far right.
You guys are replying to a fake chemjeff account, by the way.
You fag. Tormenting kids is the domain of blue-haired grade school teachers and woke psychotherapists.
Don’t forget about the tranny dancing.
Don’t forget some clergy, some sports coaches, and some of the the training/medical staff.
His DAs have barely a year to people fire bombing cars. Release people who hire hitmen on probation. Theft and assault ignored. While going after pro life protestors for 10 years.
The non-violent prison population here in the US is shameful.
Yet you cheer on no bail for non violent j6 protestors. Your bias is showing.
asset theft
Soros DAs don’t prosecute asset theft dumdum.
You aren’t very intelligent jeff.
Correct. There is no difference between the MAGA crowd and the Soros crowd.
How…how dumb are you? The entire complaint about Soros backed DAs IS PROSECUTORIAL MISCODUCT!
You cannot be this stupid, I refuse to believe you are this stupid. Someone that stupid wouldn’t have the mental capacity to breath let alone type!
Nope.
They criticized the gun charge that remained against Hunter. If their team doesn’t get off on all charges unscathed it’s a tragedy of apocalyptic proportions.
“He should sleep with the fishes,” means “he should go to Cancun and rest in the sun until he feels better.” The average man doesn’t fall for every dumb thing lawyers invent.
RICO, like most federal laws, is designed to be an easy win for prosecutors; if they say you’re guilty you are. The GA RICO law appears to be similar in structure.
This will be more difficult to prove than it seems; Trump’s endless psychotic rants do support what will doubtless be his defense; that he honestly believed, in spite of mountains of evidence to the contrary, that the election was somehow “stolen.” It’s an interesting defense and requires that the defendant make the case that he was irrationally stupid and delusional, and the prosecution, after years of claiming he opposite, must prove that he was in full command of the facts and his faculties and knew he lost. It’s mostly political theater, and until the Justice Dept gives genuine attention to the crimes of the Biden family, they have no real credibility.
Trump’s endless psychotic rants
Yes. An insanity plea might be just what he needs to do.
And it would sew up the GOP nomination for him to boot.
Mountains of evidence huh. Sure would like to see it.
So much evidence they had to invent new and novel crimes.
So much evidence they had to forbid any trials that might expose any of it.
So much evidence that the primary response to any question was “shut up, fascist”.
“until the Justice Dept”
This is not a Federal indictment.
The irrationally stupid and delusional, are the ones who think the election wasn’t stolen
Trump again claimed that many “dead people voted” in Georgia. … “The actual number [was] two,” Raffensperger said.
How, exactly, does Raffensperger know that?
Oh, well — apparently no *widespread* voting by dead people. 😎
A statewide audit of Georgia’s election verified the computer count of ballots, according to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. A total, in the end, of 4 votes by dead people were found (spouses signing mail ins of recently diceased husbands).
Evidence from affidavits also showed Fulton County double counted 4000 votes where election officials for Fulton the created false audits of their vote totals. He also was given over 15k names of people who had moved out of state but still voted.
Imagine that, recounting the ballots ends up with the same count…
How did Trump come up with “5000”?
It was way more than 5000.
“In an affidavit, [voting consultant and data expert] Davis said that he identified 14,980 people who voted after moving out of state. He also found 40,279 people who moved across county lines more than 30 days before the election, but then cast a ballot in their former county.
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/the-data-analysts-who-believe-theyve-uncovered-widespread-illegal-voting-in-georgia/
Raffensperger, like Kemp, is wholly corrupt and 100% swamp.
He is an enemy of the people and liberty.
Four indictments; multiple zealous state prosecutors; more than a handful of federal ideologues; a deluded special prosecutor; the weaponized DOJ, a bitter, vindictive Attorney General; and a corporate media totally aligned with the Trump Haters, and all against the Donald-
Hell, I make it even money.
Well once again we have to accept the underlying premise that the 2020 election was completely honest and any claims to the contrary had been “debunked”. That election was completely unprecedented thanks largely to the Covid scam creating opportunities for fraud that the republic had never before encountered. State laws were illegally ignored to accept mail in ballots that would have previously been rejected. Signature verification dropped to percentages never before seen. Pretty much every historical bellwether statistic suddenly proved to be unreliable. NGOs like Zuckbucks dumped millions not into political campaigns but actually to take control of the mechanics of state elections. All of this is in the public record and was shortly after election day. Nevertheless, Reason, Fox News and the rest of the establishment declared that the official results were unassailable two days after the election. While the famously TDS infected Jacob Sullum was fully on board with this assessment, cooler heads might have reason to wonder if maybe we should take a closer look. By January 2021 none of the questions about the legitimacy of the election had been fully addressed beyond declarations by state actors that they were without guilt.
I don’t know for a fact that Donald Trump won the 2020 election by the metrics the republic has accepted for two centuries. But no one to date has attempted to convince me otherwise. Certainly not Jacob Sullum.
It’s not up to the winner to prove he won.
Fatass Donnie has yet to produce a shred of evidence that he didn’t lose. But he did try to defraud the legitimate winner.
Is your keyboard sticky from spanking it to kiddie porn?
Tell us how you do it.
You posted dark web links to underage porn.
Buttplug uses a sock. He has many.
Putting a sock on a buttplug sounds… chafing.
Any proof of that accusation?
Well, since you mentioned it:
https://reason.com/2023/08/15/trump-and-18-others-charged-with-election-related-crimes-in-georgia/?comments=true#comment-10198934
That means Laursen will either have to a) unmute me in order to see it, or b) deny its existence.
What exactly am I supposed to be seeing besides a bunch of gray boxes, and some inane comments of yours?
Lol, never change Mike.
https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”
That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.
“and finally summoning his army of supporters to the Jan. 6 rally that ended in deadly violence at the Capitol.”
no agenda here
It was the beginning of getting him disqualified in 2024 — that’s why the word ‘insurrection’ is so important to them.
The only people to die were two women at the hands of theCapital police.
Haven’t you heard: he’s going to unveil an irrefutable, comprehensive report next week!
Guess he’s had it in his back pocket this whole time.
It should be.
This is what is annoying about Trump and his supporters; the election absolutely has plenty of stuff the question on it: courts overruling the legislatures to determine the voting rules, urban precincts using their funding (from private groups and otherwise) to unilaterally decide to be open for more hours than rural precincts. Current national intelligence officials helping to connect former national intelligence officials who created the infamous “laptop is Russian misinformation” letter. Heck, even the fact that Pfizer deviated from their filed test protocol to delay evaluation of its results (at the suggestion of an FDA official) might have something interesting behind it, if it was looked into.
But, the “scam” was in the way the information space was controlled and how the election rules and infrastructure was distributed. Thus far, we have seen very little evidence that many legal votes weren’t counted or illegal votes were counted. It is time to stop focusing on that part and start focusing on the stuff that we know happened and dig into how officials acting in an official capacity weren’t even handed.
We have seen very little evidence because US elections are designed such that such fraud is impossible to detect, and because there are no legal remedies even if fraud were detected.
I agree that it’s time to stop focusing on that part for the 2020 election.
But Republicans better have an answer to how they are going to secure elections in the future, because if there aren’t going to be massive changes in how Americans vote, we can never trust the results of our elections.
If it turns out to be okay what Trump and his pals were trying to do, then it will be okay won’t it for the Democrats to pull of the same thing in 2024 only more successfully? Oh wait, I forgot, IOKIYAR.
Like in 2000, 2004, and 2016?
Tick tock, tumor.
Yeah. It is annoying, but it is part of having free speech that people will use it to be annoying. How long did the Democrats lie about Trump colluding with Russia to steal the election? Heck, it was probably over a decade before I stopped hearing Democrat supporters (not the politicians, to be fair) calling Bush an illegitimate President or “installed” by the Supreme Court.
The whole contingent electors thing was first done in support of a Democratic candidate (and those electors didn’t have precedent to rely on that what the were doing was correct).
I’m not sure if there has been a single election that a Republican has won that a Democrat hasn’t objected to the certification of in the 21st century.
D.C. has seen tons of leftist riots far more violent than what happened in Jan 6, including one riot that severely burned a church.
As far as doing it successfully? I am still confused what they were even trying to do. From what I remember of the time, many Trump supporters wanted a bipartisan Congressional committee to look into Trump’s allegations between certification day and inauguration day. There is a perception among the left that Trump wanted to just win the thing outright on certification day, but I really don’t see how that would have worked. Even if Pence had the power to not open an envelope, he didn’t have the power to move along to a certification vote before all the envelopes were opened. Seems like even under Trump’s crazy interpretation of the law (since patched) the most likely outcome would have been President Pelosi. Even the craziest interpretation of the law didn’t give Pence the power to simply choose which envelope to open.
My understanding is that Trump is planning to accept his electoral defeat the day after Stacey Abrams does. In related news: Here’s 24 minutes straight of Democrats denying election outcomes, for your education.
https://twitter.com/ClayTravis/status/1686863861905825793
I can’t stand Trump. But it would take me 60 seconds to acquit him of the charge if this was the only evidence. He makes numerous allegations of voting irregularities that he wants fixed. Not once does he ask for vote-manipulation.
“find me 12k votes” does not qualify as asking for voter manipulation? … i really don’t know … legally do you need both the what and the how … no how only what = case dismissed
Since when does find mean fabricate especially after spending half a call identifying sources of illegal votes? Is English your second language or third?
never listened to call … only heard sound bites … i think we are saying the same thing
“never listened to the call”
yet here you are talking about it anyway
It logically isn’t “voter manipulation” because it doesn’t manipulate voters.
It also isn’t a call for election fraud because what Trump is saying is “find the 12k votes that Democrats illegally suppressed/fabricated; that should be easy given that Democrats likely fabricated tens of thousands of votes”.
Asked directly after 6,000 votes had JUST been found on recount. Taking things out of context and spinning them on their head.
It’s what the leftarded Nazi’s do day in and day out.
There’s no good guys in this whole thing.
The question that remains is can you claim that you truly believe something without actually testifying to the fact? Trump lawyers have to convince the jury that he truly believed that there was election fraud without ever letting their client testify. I see this as a big lift.
trumps defense:
1. repeatedly disparaged by the press and intelligence community (russiagate, bountygate, lafeyetteparkgate)
2. the opportunity for fraud was elevated due to the pandemic (mail in ballots, people moving / changing locations)
3. no way he believed results were legitimate cuz of 1 and 2
But will he say that in the courtroom under oath? His lawyers can say this all they want but I think a jury will want to hear from the defendant directly.
i don’t understand why that matters: 1 and 2 can easily be established without trump being in the courtroom
Point 1 is not relevant to the case. Point 2 talks about opportunity not actual fraud and there is nothing to show that significant fraud actually happened. Trump will need to convince the jury he believed there was fraud and that will likely require direct testimony.
Simultaneously Throwing out the Republican election judges in 3-4 states (including GA), then reopening the counting, and having tens of thousands of Biden votes all of a sudden show up, with few Trump votes. The excuse in GA was apparently a toilet or such leak, that turns out not to have happened. Then video of carts and trays of ballots being brought in and counted, and a mother/daughter recounting stacks of ballots over and over. All while the counting was officially closed, at least to Republican election judges. And, of course, the ballots had been separated from the provenance by then, and intermixed with the rest, so no one could tell which ballots were legitimate, with proper provenance.
Why wouldn’t he? He’s out there saying it in every stump speech he gives.
Because he doesn’t face cross examination on stump speeches. Trump doesn’t like to be questioned and he is not good under questioning. He can tell a reporter that the question was stupid and that the reporter is ugly. He cannot do that to a prosecutor in the court room and he will be expected to answer.
You’re assuming that Trump doesn’t think the election was stolen. He’ll have no problem telling anybody in the courtroom that it was stolen, and exactly how they did it. He’s not afraid of questions from an idiotic DA without a case.
One thing is clear: if Trump takes the stand there is no way his lawyers can stop him from being exposed as a total moron.
4. The FBI has already been found fabricating evidence against him
No, that’s not the question that remains. The acts Trump is accused of in the indictment were not illegal even if Trump believed that Biden had been legitimately elected.
I wonder if Hillary was getting witch-hunted like Trump is getting if she really believed a few Facebook ads by a few Russians fraud-ed the election……
Maybe we can have some equal treatment around here and prosecute Hillary exactly like Trump is being prosecuted; endlessly.
Between intent and no intent lies recklessness. I don’t know whether Trump’s simply not caring, in the context of these charges, is inculpatory or exculpatory. I know that some government forms requiring signatures under penalty of perjury have wording that means that the signatory can’t get away with recklessness, but I really don’t know whether it’s the case here.
There is no act described in the indictment where Trump engaged in such an act.
The acts Trump engaged in (tweeting, talking to officials, inviting officials to the WH, etc.) are legal even if he believed he lost the election and was simply trying to play games with the legal system.
The indictment is hogwash.
You may claim that the indictment is hogwash but we know that there are crimes consisting of trying to persuade someone else to do something illegal and there is where recklessness may lie.
You’re welcome to
(1) Point out specifically what illegal acts Trump attempted to persuade others to commit.
(2) Point out what specific laws make the attempt to persuade others is itself illegal.
Go right ahead. I don’t see anything in the indictment that satisfies either (1) or (2).
https://twitter.com/JohnnyReb1989/status/1691465428089126913?t=xbxnKS-vjA9WpPn45HUEOA&s=19
Why do the rich men north of Richmond get to control how we live? Change our laws? Destroy our way of life? Tax us to death? Most of them don’t have any ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War, or even the Civil War. Who are they to run our country? It’s like owning a home for many years and a new neighbor comes in your house and starts rearranging everything and telling you how to live. That would be insane to let someone do that. So why are we letting them do that to us?
It’s the rich and poor men north of Richmond that vote Democrat. Up north even the working class are liberals. There’s more people in the northern states than in the southern states, in a democracy the majority decides.
Why do you need ancestors that fought in the revolutionary war if you want to be in a position of power? Any system that would require you to have important ancestors in order to run for high political office wouldn’t be a democracy, more like a monarchy.
And Native Americans have been here for thousands of years, shouldn’t they be in power then? I mean according to your logic.
The USA is a mostly ‘ancestry’ written *Constitutional* Union of Republican States. NOT a democracy. Contrary to what the democratic [Na]tional So[zi]alist[s] have been propagandizing with great success.
https://twitter.com/DolioJ/status/1691574110260785401?t=R4rZo3n7VfFzGhTh35yi-Q&s=19
This is a weird way of saying “knowingly produced and released false documents to impact an election”.
[Link]
I really don’t understand the strategy here.
Shit, how did we forget Jfree?
> Count 28, for example, alleges that Trump solicited a felony during the notorious January 2, 2021, telephone conversation in which he urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the 12,000 or so votes that would be necessary to reverse Biden’s victory in that state. The felony that Trump wanted Raffensperger to commit, according to the indictment, was “violation of oath” by a “public officer,” and intentional solicitation of that crime is also a felony.
> That is a plausible interpretation of Trump’s conversation with Raffensperger, during which he floated one debunked election-fraud claim after another and seemed impervious to Raffensperger’s refutations.
Not really a plausible interpretation. If there were missing ballots, then finding them is in keeping with his oath of office. If there were not any missing ballots, then there was no way for Raffensberger to find them. So, the request was either in line with the oath or impossible. There was no way for Raffensberger to fulfill Trump’s request in a manner that would violate his oath of office.
People are acting like Trump told Raffensberger to create ballots or just arbitrary up the count or something.
The actual transcript of the call is available.
This was, in fact and in truth, as petition to the government for the redress of grievances.
That’s precisely what “find me” meant, although I agree it isn’t unambiguous enough to be used as proof in a court case.
If that is what he meant, wouldn’t he have said “create the votes” or something like that? His vocabulary is bad, but it isn’t that bad. He had plenty of ability to say what he wanted, if that was his intention. Whereas, there really aren’t many better ways to express a desire for missing votes to be located, than what Trump said.
No, he wouldn’t come right out and say precisely what he wanted no more than a mob boss would, no more than he did in his phone call with Zelenskyy.
Trump is an incoherent communicator who is challenged to speak in complete sentences. It is glaringly obvious he long ago figured out being a bit unclear in what he is saying works to his advantage.
That debunks the idea that he was speaking in code.
“Trump is an incoherent communicator who is challenged to speak in complete sentences.”
The guy who had a reality TV show? The guy who fills arenas for speeches? The guy who kicked everyone’s ass in the debates and made “Poor Jeb” a global meme?
You think that guy is an “incoherent communicator who is challenged to speak in complete sentences”?
Even Politifact admits that GA found uncounted votes: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/nov/18/facebook-posts/georgia-election-officials-found-more-2600-uncount/
That should be evidence enough of what Trump meant.
^^^THIS^^^. The blinded/ignorant narration getting painted here is completely laughable. GA just found a bunch of uncounted votes directly before that Trump conversation. Pretending it meant anything else at all is just stupid self-induced delusion. I can’t hardly believe it’s been put in a record of indictment; what a joke.
Even if Trump was just trying to misuse the legal system knowing he lost the election, nothing he did constitutes fraud or corruption or racketeering. It is perfectly legitimate to publicly lie about election results and to ask/petition government officials to do things that are against the constitution or against the law.
The Georgia indictments are politically motivated garbage.
You got that right!
Trump would have to testify. And he would lie under cross examination. And then there would be an open and shut perjury case. He would also have to throw his codefendents under the bus in his testimony, which would result in his own former allies testifying to save their own skins, with devastating effects on Trump himself.
His only hope is a pardon from Georgia’s Republican Governor.
… in the land of leftarded delusions.
What would he lie about? There is no significant dispute about the facts outlined in the indictment.
The problem with the indictment is that nothing that is alleged in the indictment is actually illegal.
You got that right!
This looks like the indictment against Rick Perry!
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The simple fact is that Trump is guilty of winning in 2016, which made him a target of every lefturd for the rest of his life. They will stop at nothing to bring him down.
-jcr