If you get your hands on a copy of the draft of Articles of Impeachment prepared by the House, you will see that one of the charges is “prior efforts to subvert and obstruct” the certification of the 2020 election. Another rock was just added to that pile. On December 23 Trump placed a call to Georgia’s lead elections investigator to “find the fraud” and told the official s/he would be a “national hero.” This call was not recorded and it’s possible that Brad Raffensperger saw fit to record his own call with Trump a few days later because he knew about this previous call. Needless to say, Trump intervening in an ongoing investigation is being viewed as obstruction of justice. Washington Post:
In an interview with The Washington Post on Friday, Raffensperger confirmed that Trump had placed the Dec. 23 call. He said he was not familiar with the specifics of what the president said in the conversation with his chief investigator, but said it was inappropriate for Trump to have tried to intervene in the case.
“That was an ongoing investigation,” Raffensperger said. “I don’t believe that an elected official should be involved in that process.”
The Post is withholding the name of the investigator, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment, because of the risk of threats and harassment directed at election officials. […]
Trump’s call to the chief investigator occurred more than a week before he spent an hour on the phone with Raffensperger, pushing him to overturn the vote. In that Jan. 2 conversation, the president alternately berated the secretary of state, tried to flatter him, begged him to act and threatened him with vague criminal consequences if the fellow Republican refused to pursue his false claims, at one point warning that he was taking “a big risk.”
Legal experts said Trump’s call to the secretary of state may have broken state or federal laws that bar the solicitation of election fraud or prohibit participating in a conspiracy against people exercising their civil rights.
Trump’s earlier call to the chief investigator could also carry serious criminal implications, according to several former prosecutors, who said that the president may have violated laws against bribery or interfering with an ongoing probe.
Another day, another instance comes to light of mob boss Trump trying to shake somebody down. Eleven more days.
For once in his life, he needs to be held accountable.
I was taught that the truth always comes out. That has been happening with trump and his criminal cronies now, and they must ALL be held accountable for their crimes!!
Until trump goes to jail, the law remains a theory.
Downright ironic, isn’t it? All he had to do was hold together a few more days and this wouldn’t be so bad. But now it’s coming back on him like the Hand of God. And the velocity and tonnage of the crap that is about to land will be an object lesson.
The priorities of my concerns are shifting. Trump himself isn’t moving down the list quite yet…but he’s about to drop fifty slots, and that’s reassuring.
Moving up my list is voter suppression considering the fifty seat Senate. This nonsense election is going to be followed by an all-put war on voting rights. We know this is coming. They’re going to close polling locations, pass laws to ban drop boxes, limit mail voting…the expanded franchise showed itself to be the existential crisis to the GOP we always suspected it was.
If I knew anything about the Civil War, I’d make an adroit analogy to a battle the Union won early on. But I don’t…because I hated the Civil War, and my AP History text book was written by a U.K. company that divided the war into chapters on economics, politics and social aspects, and we glossed over the boring military campaigns.
I know a lot about Napoleon’s 1812 Russia campaign, though. When the French arrived in Moscow, Napoleon temporarily released his men from their military service…he sort of put them on leave so they could go loot the city. Without his strict leadership, the French army immediately becomes an unruly mob, which ends up burning Moscow down, destroying any supplies that were the hope of getting home safe, and Tolstoy mentions this as the exact moment when the history of France and Russia was set on a course leading to disaster.
Maybe this is a bit like that moment. Trump is being exiled, leaving his hoarde to run rampant.
Read up on the Fourth Crusade, Rory. The tangled politics of that particular misadventure might be a bit more instructive.
If you haven’t seen it, there is a video of Trump and family partying while they watch their goons head toward the Capitol. Going viral on Twitter on Amy Siskind’s account. This was all planned.
This was planned in the same way your average junkie plans to knock over a 7-11 for its cash.
It was planned, but not thoroughly. I don’t think they thought that Congress and Pence would be an real danger.
It was before that, but they were enjoying the preceding acts in their show. And Guilfoyle is displaying her profession, which is illegal in 49.7 states.
They clearly had help from the military and some others. (DOD is calling it “1st Amendment Riots”, which is deceptive.)
He might be able to justify calling Raffensperger, but not an investigator.
That’s exactly the argument as I understand it.