Fulton County Georgia DA Fani Willis’ 100 page indictment of former President Donald Trump, and 18 people involved in Trump’s re-election campaign is all based on one, central allegation; “Defendant Donald John Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020. One of the states he lost was Georgia. Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined (a) conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.”
All charges and allegations made in this indictment descend from this key assertion.
The same can be said for the federal indictment brought in Washington DC by Special Counsel Jack Smith. That document also states that “(t)he Defendant, DONALD J. TRUMP, was the forty-fifth President of the United States and a candidate for re-election in 2020. The Defendant lost the 2020 presidential election… (d)espite having lost…for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won. These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false. But the Defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway—to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.”
We have discussed the difficulty in establishing that Trump knew he had actually lost (especially when so many of his fellow citizens also think Trump actually won), and in proving that the former President knew that his complaints of being cheated were false.
Yet, the unswerving position of the majority of the Democratic party and their supporters in the legal and legacy media establishments is that “election denial” is a crime in and of itself. For instance, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, Smith’s “indictment amounts to another in a series of emphatic rejections of election denial since the 2020 election…(a) federal prosecutor has now weighed in, charging that the actions Trump took under the pretext of election denial were criminal…(o)ver the last two years, election denial has been proven false so many times that another debunking is unremarkable – this one, however, is historic in that it comes with charges against a former president.”
Then there is the Movement Advancement Project (MAP), “an independent nonprofit think tank that provides rigorous research, insight and communications that help speed equality and opportunity for all,” which has issued a report entitled How Election Denialism Threatens Our Democracy and the Safeguards We Need to Defend It. The report “measures the level of risk to each state posed by election denialism, (and) the resulting threats when the proper safeguards are not in place…(t)he report includes MAP’s new National Election Denial Risk Index, which shows that more than two in three American voters (157 million voters) live in states with at least a moderate risk of election denialism jeopardizing future elections. Of those, 29 million voters live in high-risk states for election denial.” MAP asserts that their Index “is a tool for lawmakers, journalists, and the public that can be used to examine the range of ways that election denialism poses a threat to each state and which policies can strengthen a state’s ability to combat these threats.”
One of MAP’s recommended solutions to the “crime” of election denial? “(L)imiting partisan involvement in post-election processes, increasing penalties for election subversion, and limiting frivolous recount requests.”
Sure, who needs more free speech and participation in the democratic process? Certainly not the people at MAP!
And certainly not Jack Smith or Fani Willis.
But both seem to have their sights set on only one particular election denier and his followers. Aren’t there other targets out there – others who denied they lost their election and refused to concede, causing the “threat” of “election denialism?”
The report concludes tomorrow
Judge John Wilson served on the bench in NYC