Trump Wanted So Stay In Office. Long Live Trump.




that if they have evidence that Trump or people in his circle were ringleaders -- or even aiders and abetters or inciters (see
@eisen
et al new pros memo re §2283), they would have similar resolve to go after them, constitutional complications be damned.
 
lennypartiv said:
Don't they get a trial first? Nice to now you are setting up the gallows well before the trial date.
Click to expand...

Of course they get a trial if they want one. And once found guilty, they lose their right to vote.

tenor.gif
 
Republican Congress members held another of their many, many rage-filled hearings on Thursday. This one had the stated purpose of propping Republican-supported spoiler candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in front of the cameras so that he could spew his racist, antisemitic, anti-scientific conspiracy theories while crying to a worldwide audience that he was being censored.

But of course, that wasn’t the sole purpose of the hearing. Republicans also used the time to spread their own elaborate conspiracy theories and talk about America’s most crucial issues: Hunter Biden’s laptop, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and Hunter Biden’s laptop. At least this time around they did not choose to illustrate their points with revenge porn.

As Republicans rolled on through the day, tossing their own brand of woo woo onto the heaping pile of ugly and harmful nonsense that Kennedy carried into the chamber, one thing about all this began to make sense: Republicans should believe in an elaborate scheme involving thousands of individuals and hundreds of officials cooperating to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Because that’s exactly what happened.


NPR has been keeping a handy database of those involved in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. As of July 14, a total of 1,064 people have faced charges in connection to the failed insurrection. Of those, 617 have pleaded guilty. Another 124 have faced trials. Only two have been acquitted.

Estimates of those who battered their way into the Capitol on Jan. 6 put the number at over 2,000. In addition, hundreds more pro-Donald Trump rioters battered police, damaged structures, and violated D.C. weapons laws. So it’s likely that all the numbers above will continue to grow as more of those involved are identified and arrested.

But these people are, for the most part, just foot soldiers. Sure, among them were members of the Oath Keepers who were convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to years in federal prison, but even these guys were way down in the pecking order. They are the followers.

This week, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel charged 16 false electors who signed certificates alleging that Donald Trump had won the 2020 election with eight felonies each, including conspiracy to commit election law forgery. Each of these charges has a maximum sentence of 14 years. Since the 16 false electors range in age from 55 to 81, they may want to rethink their retirement plans.

But Michigan isn’t the only state that had slates of false electors, or the only state where they may face charges. Wisconsin has been considering charges against the 10 false electors there, and a lawsuit is moving ahead that seeks $2.4 million in damages from the electors and from the Trump lawyers who advised them. False electors in other states have been connected to subpoenas from the FBI and meetings with the office of the special counsel, suggesting that federal charges may soon be filed by Jack Smith.

In all, there are 84 of these false electors scattered across Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. As the AZ Mirror reports, the group includes:



(full article online)



www.dailykos.com

It's no wonder Republicans believe in conspiracy theories

Republican Congress members held another of their many, many rage-filled hearings on Thursday. This one had the stated purpose of propping Republican-supported spoiler candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr .
www.dailykos.com
 
Among the materials turned over to special counsel Jack Smith about supposed fraud in the 2020 election are documents that touch on many of the debunked conspiracies and unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud peddled by former Donald Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.
The documents had been withheld by former New York Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik, who claimed they were privileged, only to be handed over to Smith on Sunday at what appears to be the late stages of the federal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The files include affidavits claiming there were widespread “irregularities,” shoddy statistical analyses supposedly revealing “fraudulent activities,” and opposition research about a senior employee from Dominion Voting Systems that are central to civil litigation and a federal criminal probe stemming from a voting systems breach in Colorado.
The documents turned over by Kerik also connect him and other members of the Trump legal team to the efforts to smear a Dominion Voting Systems executive – efforts that are now the subject of both civil litigation and the Colorado state criminal investigation.

The tranche includes a 29-page dossier on the executive, Eric Coomer, detailing his anti-Trump rhetoric on social media, as well as his background working for the voting machine company. The header of the document describes it as written by a lawyer in North Carolina for the “Hon. Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Trump Legal Team, and Other Associated Attorneys Combatting Election Fraud, 2020 Presidential Election.”

Coomer has brought a defamation lawsuit against the Trump campaign, Giuliani and others who promoted claims that he was connected to a plot to rig the 2020 election.

The documents turned over by Kerik also include a 105-page report from after the 2020 election compiled by the Trump campaign and Giuliani that contained the campaign’s unfounded allegations of fraud, including witness statements and false allegations of over-votes and illegal votes.

They also include communications between investigators hired by Giuliani – including Kerik – about the debunked report about irregularities in Antrim County, Michigan, that Trump was repeatedly told was bogus but continued to tout up to and on January 6, 2021.

One example is a memo titled “Briefing materials for Senate members” sent by Katherine Friess – a former Trump lawyer – to Kerik, Steve Bannon and an email address known to belong to Giuliani on January 4, 2021.

For months, Kerik had tried to shield some of the documents from investigators in Congress and the Justice Department, citing privilege. Then, in recent weeks, Kerik gave the documents to Trump’s 2024 campaign to review. After that review, the campaign declined to assert privilege, according to Kerik’s lawyer, Tim Parlatore, who then turned over the documents to the Smith’s office on Sunday.

“I have shared all of these documents, appropriately 600MB, mostly pdfs, with the Special Counsel and look forward to sitting down with them in about two weeks to discuss,” Parlatore said.

That interview with federal investigators in Smith’s office has now been set for early August.

‘An army of phantom voters’​

This tranche of documents turned over to Smith further illustrates the scope of unproven fraud claims that were being circulated to high-level Trump allies at the time.




(full article online)



 
  • Stefanie Lambert, suspect in Michigan vote machine tampering case, says she has been indicted
  • Lambert is one of nine suspects loyal to former President Donald Trump referred to special prosecutor last year
  • The suspects, including the sheriff of Barry County, are accused of trying to find evidence the 2020 election was rigged against Trump



www.bridgemi.com

‘I have been indicted,’ says suspect in Michigan vote machine tampering probe | Bridge Michigan

Attorney Stefanie Lambert says she has been indicted in plot to illegally examine vote machines in an effort to prove 2020 election was rigged against Donald Trump. Others under investigation include Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf.
www.bridgemi.com www.bridgemi.com
 
One Georgia Republican is hoping the recent concession by Rudy Giuliani that he made defamatory statements concerning two Georgia poll workers finally causes MAGA voters to open their eyes.

In a new filing, the former New York City mayor conceded that he made defamatory and false statements about Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, but did not admit those statements caused damage to the pair.

The two women are suing Giuliani for defamationafter he falsely asserted they committed election fraud to benefit President Joe Biden.

Still, Georgia GOP election official Gabriel Sterling pointed out on Twitter Thursday that Giuliani’s statement puts to rest any notion of “widespread voter fraud” during the 2020 presidential election.

“Rudy Giuliani admits that he lied about Shaye Moss & Ruby Freeman,” he wrote. “We’ve known for years that he lied about them and the events at State Farm Arena. For those that still believe there was widespread voter fraud, these people are admitting they lied to you.”


(full article online )


news.yahoo.com

Georgia Republican Tells Voters 'They Lied To You' After Giuliani Bombshell

"For those that still believe there was widespread voter fraud, these people are admitting they lied to you," election official Gabriel Sterling tweeted on Thursday.
news.yahoo.com news.yahoo.com
 
A federal judge late Friday dismissed Donald Trump’s $475 million defamation lawsuit against CNN, in which the former president argued that the cable network’s statements about his false 2020 election fraud claims likened him to Adolf Hitler.

In the lawsuit, Trump’s team argued that CNN writers and television anchors’ use of the phrase the “Big Lie,” in five specific incidents, incited “readers and viewers to hate, contempt, distrust, ridicule, and even fear” him. But U.S. District Judge Raag Singhal, who Trump appointed in 2019, reasoned that because all of CNN’s statements were opinion, Trump could not legally sue the network for defamation.


(full article online)



www.politico.com

Judge dismisses Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ lawsuit against CNN

“Being ‘Hitler-like’ is not a verifiable statement of fact that would support a defamation claim,” a Trump-appointed judge wrote.
www.politico.com www.politico.com
 
Part 1


by Laurence H. Tribe
August 8, 2023


Special Counsel Jack Smith has concluded that he can prove that several private lawyers acted as co-conspirators in former President Donald Trump’s criminal effort to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election. That conclusion, which is backed up by an enormous body of evidence, has significant implications for American democracy as well as for what it says about members of the legal profession. In the wake of this historic indictment, it is important for those of us with more information to come forward.

I am personally familiar with an aspect of the indictment’s documentary evidence that may shed light on the actions of one of the attorneys – Kenneth Chesebro — who is identified as Co-Conspirator 5 by the special counsel.

In a civil suit, Judge David Carter called the 2020 election interference scheme “a coup in search of a legal theory.” What I have to offer here can shed light on the anatomy of that fraud. It shows how the attorneys concocted arguments that gave the scheme an air of legitimacy but one that could not withstand public scrutiny. I know this well because a key memorandum drafted by Chesebro — which might otherwise appear relatively innocuous even in how it is discussed in the indictment — laid the foundation for the scheme grounded, in part, on misrepresenting my work. I know this especially well because of my prior communications with Chesebro.

I. Background​

According to the indictment, the Trump attorneys participated in a “corrupt plan to subvert the federal government function by stopping Biden electors’ votes from being counted and certified” (para 54). They allegedly helped devise and implement central parts of the conspiracy. Those schemes include an effort to use false slates of electors to obstruct the congressional certification of the election and an effort to get Vice President Mike Pence to use his ceremonial role to interfere with the certification.

The special counsel alleges that Chesebro “assisted in devising and attempting to implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding” (para 8). It is important to note that the indictment alleges that he and other attorneys’ criminal conduct involved knowingly misrepresenting facts (not just misrepresenting the law). For instance, the indictment states that Rudy Giuliani and Chesebro made factual claims they knew to be false to GOP electors in Pennsylvania to induce those electors to swear to certifications that the two attorneys knew to be fraudulent (paras 61-62).





www.justsecurity.org

Anatomy of a Fraud: Kenneth Chesebro’s Misrepresentation of My Scholarship in His Efforts to Overturn the 2020 Presidential Election - Just Security

"A key memorandum drafted by Chesebro -- which might otherwise appear relatively innocuous even in how it is discussed in the indictment -- laid the foundation for the scheme grounded, in part, on misrepresenting my work."
www.justsecurity.org www.justsecurity.org
 
Part 2

II. The November 18 Memorandum​

The indictment focuses on a series of confidential memoranda that Chesebro wrote in devising the plan to orchestrate false slates of electors. “The plan capitalized on ideas presented in memoranda drafted by Co-Conspirator 5,” the special counsel states (para 54). The first of these documents – Chesebro’s November 18 Memorandum — came five days after “the Defendant’s Campaign attorneys conceded in court that he had lost the vote count in the state of Arizona – meaning, based on the assessment the Defendant’s Campaign advisors had given him just a week earlier, the Defendant had lost the election” (para 13).

That Memorandum, entitled “The Real Deadline for Settling a State’s Electoral Votes,” relied on a gross misrepresentation of my scholarship. What follows are my recollections of Chesebro’s communications with me and my impressions of his misuse of what I had written. Readers can draw their own conclusions.

As the title of the November 18 Memorandum indicates, Chesebro focuses on what he considers the “real deadline” under the federal scheme for presidential elections (see the Memorandum’s “Summary”). In the body of the Memorandum, he quotes me completely out of context. I was discussing the specifics of Florida state law — not what federal law (or, for that matter, any other state’s law) requires or permits.

What’s worse, in quoting and citing two pages of an article I wrote in the Harvard Law Review, the Memorandum makes me stand for the outlandish proposition that, whatever Congress might say and whatever the State’s chief executive might have certified as its official Electoral Slate, any State is free to continue “recounting” the votes cast in that State’s presidential election until January 6, two weeks before the impending presidential inauguration. To compound that problem, Chesebro uses that proposition as support for the myth that the way Hawaii’s electoral votes were counted for Kennedy over Nixon in the 1960 presidential election “buttresses” my supposed “conclusion” and thereby supports this imagined power of each State in the election process.

As an aside, I am not addressing here Chesebro’s misuse of the 1960 history. Others have amply explained how the 1960 Hawaii case has no conceivable application to the events of the 2020 false electors scheme.

It is very clear in the Harvard Law Review article that I was discussing how to interpret a particular piece of Florida legislation. I wrote:

“You can read the Florida statutes–which deal with presidential and gubernatorial elections in the same set of provisions– backwards and forwards without finding even the slightest clue that the state legislature ever decided that all recounts in a contested presidential election must stop by December 12 or, for that matter, at any time before the electors meet to give their votes on December 18, or even before Congress starts to count the votes on January 6.” (emphasis added)
Click to expand...
The Chesebro memo extracted the final clause of that passage as though it were a general proposition about the power of States to do what they wish regardless of the Electoral Count Act and independent of the deadlines set by Congress. His memo states:

“The last-minute counting of the Hawaii electoral votes in favor of Kennedy in 1960 buttresses the conclusion of constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe that, absent some indication by a State to the contrary, the only real deadline for a state to complete its recount of a presidential election is ‘before Congress starts to count the votes on January 6.’” (emphasis in original)
Click to expand...
I can say with confidence that the proposition that Chesebro misattributes to me is one I have never embraced. Among other things, it completely disregards the role of the Electoral Count Act – and, even more fundamentally, of Article II of the Constitution in empowering Congress to set the “Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes, which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.”

In his Memorandum, Chesebro then grossly misrepresents what I wrote in my constitutional law treatise on the power of one Congress, through legislation, to bind a future Congress’s ability to pass new legislation (American Constitutional Law, 3d ed., vol.1, §2-3, at 125-26 n.1 (2000)). My point was simple: That no power exists to create “meta-law;” any congressional statute can be amended or revoked by a later statute. In the context of the Electoral Count Act, it would naturally mean the Act is binding unless and until a future Congress decided to revise or revoke the statute – as the current Congress in fact did, in passing a lawsigned by the president in late 2022.

Chesebro’s Memorandum flips this on its head, citing my work in support of the very opposite conclusion to undercut the constitutional status of the Electoral Count Act. Why did he feel the need in mid-November 2020 to challenge the binding nature of the Electoral Count Act? The scheme that was carried out over the next several months required just such a challenge, and Chesebro appears to have foreseen it.

Specifically, in an apparent effort to get around the obviously binding force of the Electoral Count Act – as to which John Eastman infamously wrote Vice President Pence’s chief counsel to “implore” him to consider “one more relatively minor violation” of the ECA (para 122) – Chesebro completely misused part of the latest edition of my constitutional law treatise (he cites the pages referenced above). In those passages I explained my view as to why “the power of Congress legislatively to bind subsequent Congresses is limited, for any statute that purported to direct or to forbid subsequent Congresses to do certain things or to follow certain procedures could be repealed, as could any other law, by another duly enacted statute.” Despite the clearly limited nature of that modest proposition, Chesebro cites my writing as though it stands for the radical claim that it would be wrong “to view the Electoral Count Act as tying the Senate’s hands, unless amended” (emphasis added). That is, he averred that the Electoral Count Act could be flouted without a subsequent amendment or revocation by Congress.

What’s worse, as a result of this misrepresentation, Chesebro put me in the (outlandish) camp of those suggesting that the Electoral Count Act can be disregarded – for example, by a unilateral vice presidential decision to deem it “unconstitutional.” He cites other authorities purporting to be aligned with the views he ascribes to me. And his emails to Eastman and Giuliani subsequently first proposed a Senate hearing “with at least two highly qualified legal scholars concluding that the President of the Senate is solely responsible for counting the votes, and that the Electoral Count Act is unconstitutional in dictating limits on debate and dictating who wins electoral votes when there are 2 competing slates and the House and Senate disagree” and then set forth a plan whereby the “Vice President will have emphasized the need for focus on plain language and adherence to the Constitution, by rejecting the role of presiding officer imposed by the Electoral Count Act.”

I must assume that Chesebro knew better when he wrote those remarkable statements in 2020 (perhaps presuming that, because his memo was marked privileged and confidential, I and others would never see it).





www.justsecurity.org

Anatomy of a Fraud: Kenneth Chesebro’s Misrepresentation of My Scholarship in His Efforts to Overturn the 2020 Presidential Election - Just Security

"A key memorandum drafted by Chesebro -- which might otherwise appear relatively innocuous even in how it is discussed in the indictment -- laid the foundation for the scheme grounded, in part, on misrepresenting my work."
www.justsecurity.org www.justsecurity.org
 
Part 3

Here is further background to the best of my recollection:

  • Chesebro had worked with me on these very matters in Bush v. Gore and Bush v. Palm Beach County (I was the Counsel of Record in both those cases) and Chesebro, although no longer part of my core research team then, was privy to all the key conversations;
  • Chesebro had discussed these matters with me personally shortly after the Supreme Court’s decisive December 12, 2000 decision in favor of George W. Bush, halting the Florida recount by a vote of 5-4;
  • Chesebro had played a role in the research underlying the relevant part of the third edition of my treatise (see page ix of the preface to the third edition, listing Chesebro along with people like Elena Kagan, Ronald Klain, and Jeff Toobin in my acknowledgements);
  • Indeed, when I acknowledged Chesebro’s role as a research assistant from the Class of 1986 along with Kagan and Toobin (see. pg iv of the preface to the second edition, 1988), I was specifically referencing work Chesebro had done for me on the precise topic of congressional power under the Necessary and Proper Clause (Art. I, §8, Cl. 18), to regulate the operations of all three branches, including Congress itself, in their discharge of specialized functions – a power I argued, though not everyone agreed, did not extend so far as to enable any one Congress to tie the hands of future Congresses with respect to how they opt to make law, including how their legislative products are to be construed and applied by the other two branches.
  • Finally, Chesebro discussed these very issues with me after reading my 2001 Harvard Law Review article criticizing the concurring opinion by Chief Justice Rehnquist. At the time, Chesebro gave me every indication of agreeing with my views of all these issues, although of course we now have good reason to doubt that Chesebro was ever principled enough to say what he really thought as opposed to what he thought it would help him to have others believe he thought.
Chesebro’s conduct in the 2020 election is one of the reasons I joined several dozen prominent legal figures in signing onto an ethics complaint against him submitted to the Supreme Court of New York’s attorney grievance committee. That complaint alleged that his “conduct was infused throughout with ‘dishonesty, fraud, deceit, [and] reckless or intentional misrepresentation’ contrary to the core standard of” the rules of professional conduct.

The latest indictment places his conduct in even more stark terms.

My own conclusion is that all of this, the indictment included, reveals that from at least mid-November 2020, Chesebro had contrived a scheme (later adapted by Eastman), which included misusing the very parts of my treatise that Chesebro had helped me with as a research assistant going back to the second edition (1988), thereby casting me falsely as a supporter of a ludicrous reading of the Constitution that Chesebro and Eastman both apparently sought to normalize so that it would make it easier for Trump to get away with circumventing the Act.

A dissection of the November 18 Memorandum shows not only a gross misrepresentation of legal authorities, but more importantly Chesebro’s pivotal role in laying the groundwork for “a coup in search of a legal theory.”

The import of all this goes well beyond elections past and reaches to elections yet to come. Congress meticulously updated and reinforced the Electoral Count Act in legislation signed into lawlast December. In future elections, removing the guardrails of the Electoral Count Act as Chesebro sought to do could grievously endanger our entire system of self-government under law.





www.justsecurity.org

Anatomy of a Fraud: Kenneth Chesebro’s Misrepresentation of My Scholarship in His Efforts to Overturn the 2020 Presidential Election - Just Security

"A key memorandum drafted by Chesebro -- which might otherwise appear relatively innocuous even in how it is discussed in the indictment -- laid the foundation for the scheme grounded, in part, on misrepresenting my work."
www.justsecurity.org www.justsecurity.org
 
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