Promise kept! Digging around for information on the actions in the county next to ours, I ran across an RS article that sheds some light on it. Yes, I use that website a lot, but these columns are a bit off the beaten track, and they’ve been both informative and helpful. Why not continue using them as a jumping-off point? With indebtedness to Raw Story:
President Donald Trump may have undermined potential criminal prosecutions after an FBI raid of an elections office in the Georgia county where he was indicted, according to a new report. The New York Times reported Monday that the president had ordered Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, to assist in the FBI operation last week in Fulton County, and the spy chief then met with agents who had seized truckloads of 2020 ballots and called Trump, who spoke with the investigators himself.
Wait, what? Knew about the raid. Did NOT know about the Trump call. The story is from yesterday, and I had just glanced at it, but now it’s more in play, especially with Gabbard going there. 2020 ballots. What the hell. Is Trump just that ridiculously obsessed with the 2020 election to pull shizzle like this? We know what happened. We know Trump begged us to change the numbers so he could win. And we know he was brought up on charges! Geez, this is ridiculous. (Yes, I know he’s obsessed, but this is beyond!)
“What occurred during the meeting was even further outside the bounds of normal law enforcement procedure,” the Times reported. “Ms. Gabbard used her cellphone to call Mr. Trump, who did not initially pick up but called back shortly after, the people said. The president addressed the agents on speakerphone, asking them questions as well as praising and thanking them for their work on the inquiry, according to three people with knowledge of the discussion.”
The squad supervisor primarily fielded the president’s questions, and one U.S. official told the newspaper the call was perhaps a minute long and compared his message to a pep talk or a coach’s halftime speech. That source said Trump gave no substantive direction to the investigators but had personally ordered Gabbard to join the search and had coordinated her actions with FBI deputy co-director Andrew Bailey.
He says he’s outside the law and order system. Remember that ‘absolute immunity’ that SCOTUS gave him? The people with principles on that court must have been screaming. It didn’t make a difference, and now we’re stuck with someone who has no morals, like an alley cat, who can do any damn thing. But is his cabinet immune? Quite a question to consider there.
“Even for a president who has radically transformed the Justice Department and the FBI by trampling over their political independence and using them as tools for personal retribution, Mr. Trump appears to be taking that kind of involvement to a new level,” the Times reported. “Rather than going to senior department or FBI officials, Mr. Trump spoke directly to the frontline agents doing the granular work of a politically sensitive investigation in which he has a large personal stake.” “By speaking directly with the investigators, the president may have provided significant ammunition to any future defense should the investigation yield criminal charges,” the report added.
“But multiple prior investigations — including one at the end of Mr. Trump’s first term by the same FBI office and federal prosecutors working at the time for the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Atlanta — found no evidence to support his false claims of significant voter fraud,” the report added.
(There is more to the article here.) Since Trump is ‘swearing there will be charges’, he may have kicked his own a$$. Sure, we can’t go after him right now, if ever. However, what he did is, again, ammunition for the defense. It could certainly be considered a vindictive prosecution. (And politically motivated, but we already knew that.) I’m hoping the Jack Smith cases can be reopened because he was certainly not immune to that crap. That would be poetic in a mean and nasty way, but Trump deserves it. He’s sliding towards dementia. He’s sundowning. But damn, he needs to go down and down hard.
Friends, I know everyone begs you for money. I promise that among all those asking for spare change, we are the smallest and the hardest-working. We’re a group of old, disabled people, except for one writer in his mid-50s. The rest of us are in our sixties and seventies, and this is a labor of love. All we’re asking for is the chance to keep telling the truth about Trump and help ensure democracy survives. If you can help, please do. Thank you. Ursula
it was all his own snd guiliani’s lies that his addled brain has tansformed into the truth. even if he fi ds a way to chsnge thr georgia outcome it won’t hsnge the election.
Yes, it is far, far too late for any of that. He won’t gain anything by prosecuting his enemies either, but he’s dong so anyhow/
What most annoys me is that the people who sued the State of Georgia to prohibit this in the first place seemed to have failed in presenting their case in the first place. For some reason, they only took the State to court over just Drumpf’s intended scheme in general without presenting the idea that Drumpf’s targeting ONLY Fulton County was a violation of the (non) precedent case of Gore v Bush in which the Supreme Court ruled the State of Florida was violating the rights of ALL Floridians by simply limiting their recounts of the disputed ballots from just four counties rather than holding a statewide recount of all ballots (and because the Court decided the Electoral College meeting date could absolutely NOT be changed or delayed while the recount proceeded, it forced the State to end any recount).
Now, again, the Court decided that the case should NEVER be considered a “precedent” for any other case, but, I’d say in this instance, since Drumpf is going after just ONE singular county in the State of Georgia, the Gore v Bush case most certainly DID set a precedent. Drumpf should have ordered a raid on EVERY county’s election headquarters. But, instead, he went after the one county where he faced prosecution for HIS post-election shenanigans.
See, this is why I have readers like you (and others, of course) to keep me honest. I had not extrapolated that far into it. This is also why I stay away from big stories, because my only experience writing about politics is here.
I agree about the Georgia/Fulton County thing as compared with Florida, and only 4 counties. I still think Gore should have won, too. But that’s just me.