12/19/21: If you’re not paying attention, you are missing the opportunity to see a plot to steal the last election revealed. The investigation being conducted by a committee in the U.S. House of Representatives continues to show that then-President Trump and his allies were willing to do anything to retain power.
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Who tried to steal the election? This guy. |
This is no longer a matter of opinion , if it ever was. These are the facts as we know them. Let’s start with one which prevails:
FIRST: Team Trump went to court in more than sixty venues, state and federal, and tried to prove the election was stolen. They failed every time to make their legal points. They got slapped down by the U.S. Supreme Court – in a one-sentence rejection. They got slapped down by federal judges, “Obama judges” and “Trump judges,” alike, and judges appointed by every president since at least Ronald Reagan.
Now we learn that unnamed Trump allies in Congress didn’t care about what the courts had to say.
They didn’t really care if they could prove their case.
SECOND: On November 4, one day after the election, with all votes still not tallied in states like Arizona and North Carolina, an unnamed ally of the president sent this message to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
This is a call to steal the
election – assuming a U.S. Supreme Court, tilted, the lawmaker must have hoped,
by three Trump nominees would conspire.
Allow me to put this recently-revealed message in large font:
____________________
HERE’s an AGGRESSIVE STRATEGY: Why can t [sic]
the states of GA NC PENN and other R controlled state houses declare this is BS
(where conflicts and election not called that night) and just send their own
electors to vote and have it go to the SCOTUS.
____________________
You have then an ally of Mr. Trump purposing to ignore the peoples’ votes. Why would this be so deadly to democracy?
Let us be specific here:
NORTH CAROLINA
THIRD: Although the votes in North Carolina had not been completely tallied, and the count would drag until November 13, President Trump did go on to win that state’s electoral votes.
In other words, you had an ally of the President of the United States plotting to stop the vote in a state Trump won.
Why, then, have an election at all?
GEORGIA
FOURTH: President Trump would soon claim that there had been “massive voter fraud” in the State of Georgia. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, would order a hand recount of all votes.
The result: “In Georgia’s recount, the highest error rate in any county recount was .73%. Most counties found no change in their finally tally. The majority of the remaining counties had changes of fewer than ten ballots.”
Trump lost again.
The biggest mistake in counting came in Floyd County, controlled by Republican election officials, where 2,600 votes on a memory stick had not been uploaded. Once tallied the president gained 686 votes.
He still didn’t win.
Team Trump demanded a third recount. This recount was conducted and completed by December 7. Biden’s lead (12,670 votes) shrank slightly (to 11,779). For the third time in a row, the president lost. (See also: 12/28/21.)
FIFTH: The president had another anti-democratic trick or two up his sleeve. On December 15, 2020, he retweeted a post by L. Lin Wood, a lawyer on his legal team, claiming that Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, both Republicans, had refused to declare the results in Georgia void and had the nerve to stand by the integrity of the state’s voting system. They had, then, missed their chance to help Trump grab the state’s 16 electoral votes.
Now, Wood warned, they would “soon be going to jail.”
Not until March 2021, was it revealed that on December 23, 2020, the president tried again. This time he placed a six-minute call to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s lead investigator, Frances Watson. He wanted her help. He wanted her to find the fraud he insisted had taken place in Georgia – even though two recounts had already shown there was no significant fraud. Trump insisted there was massive fraud, “And, you know, and I won Georgia. I know that. By a lot. And the people know it.” “Something happened. Something bad happened,” he said.
Trump had been told by lawyers on his team that there had been massive fraud in Fulton County, a county controlled by Democratic election officials. Trump claimed again: “You’re going to find things that are going to be unbelievable. The dishonesty that we’ve heard from them.”
“Whatever you can do, Frances, it would be – it’s a great thing,” he told her. “The people of Georgia are so angry at what happened to me.” Finally, he hinted: “When the right answer comes out you’ll be praised.”
“I can assure you, our team, the GBI, are only interested in the truth,” Watson replied. “Finding information based on the facts.”
SIXTH: Stymied in the courts, stymied by official recounts, with time running out to pull off the real steal, on January 2, the president put in a call to Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger. Also on the Georgia end were Jordan Fuchs, Raffensperger’s top aide, and Ryan Germany, a state lawyer. (All three men are Republicans.) This time the call lasted over an hour. Trump started off by insisting he had been cheated out of hundreds of thousands of votes. For the first half hour he threw around big numbers and the state officials mostly listened.
Finally, Trump insisted that Raffensperger “find” the 11,780 votes he needed to win, one more than required to wipe out Biden’s lead in the third recount. You can read a transcript of the call if you’re interested.
Or you can listen yourself.
Secretary Raffensperger will later write, in reference to this call, “I felt then – and still believe today – that this was a threat. … Others obviously thought so, too, because some of Trump’s more radical followers have responded as if it was their duty to carry out this threat.”
Death threats had been made to a number of election officials in Georgia, both Republican and Democrat, because they refused to bow to the president’s will.
PENNSYLVANIA
This new law “serves to preserve the integrity of every election.”
SEVENTH: No one with even a rudimentary understanding of how voting works should have been surprised on November 4 to discover that not all of the votes had been counted. Yet that anti-democratic ally of the president didn’t want the counting in Pennsylvania to continue.
As early as October 12, three weeks before Election Day, it was known that 2.6 million Pennsylvanians had asked for mail-in ballots. That included 1.8 million requests from registered Democrats – and 800,000 from registered Republicans.
We might add, in an effort to provide perspective, that
mail-in balloting prevailed in Ohio and Florida, two battleground states Trump
won in 2020. Trump voted by mail in Florida in 2020, just as he had four
years before. In Ohio the same “suspicious” trends that Trump enablers would
later cite as evidence of a perverse plot in Pennsylvania prevailed. Absentee
ballot numbers were huge: 3.5 million Ohioans voting by mail. (That would
include this blogger himself.) Turnout was the highest ever. And this had
nothing to do with fraud.
Pennsylvania also had a record turnout of voters in 2020, with 2.6 million citizens in that state voting absentee or by mail. The only difference being that Trump won in Ohio and lost in Pennsylvania.
Lawyers for Team Trump would later claim that the changes to election law in Pennsylvania had been made to ensure that Democrats could cheat their way to a victory in 2020. It took almost no effort to discover that Republican leaders of both houses of the Pennsylvania legislature had touted the benefits of the law – when it passed – thirteen months before the election.
“This bill was not written to benefit one party or the other, or any one candidate or single election,” House Majority Leader Bryan Cutler explained. “It was developed over a multi-year period with input of people from different backgrounds and regions of Pennsylvania. It serves to preserve the integrity of every election and lift the voice of every voter in the commonwealth.”
Cutler is a Republican.
Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman – also a Republican – also
touted the new law. “Compromise has given Pennsylvanians a modernized election
code that preserves the integrity of the ballot box and makes it easier for
voters to choose the people who represent them.”
Experts had also warned of a “red mirage” on Election Night. In-person votes would run red in Pennsylvania, because Democratic leaders had pushed their partisans to vote early, to get as many votes “banked” as they could.
And when all the mail-in ballots were counted – they would have nearly a million more in the bank.
Indeed, Pennsylvania’s 2019 election law stipulated that no mail-in ballots could be counted until after polls closed. So it should have surprised no one to see Biden’s vote totals rise faster than Trump’s the next day. In any election, in any state, votes come in slower in the most-populated counties, and those counties are almost always Democratically-controlled. Rural, predominantly red areas, get votes in quick. Blue counties lag.
See, for example, Potter County, Pennsylvania, which went for Trump more than 3-1, 7,239 votes for the incumbent, to Biden’s piddling 1,726.
Then consider Philadelphia County, which includes the city of
the same name. They had more than 80 times as many votes to count, and Biden
swamped the president there, by a count of 603,790 to 132,740.
Trump enablers would later claim the vote in Philadelphia County was rigged. Why? Because look at those numbers! In reality, percentage-wise, they were little changed from numbers four years earlier, when Trump won Pennsylvania, but Hillary Clinton carried the county by a vote of 560,542 to 105,418.
“That has not happened.”
EIGHTH: It is a fact that Al Gore lost a much closer election in 2000, with Florida and the whole election going for George W. Bush by a margin of a little more than 500 votes out of 5.8 million cast.
Gore did not plot to overturn the vote.
In a similar vein, Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, including losing in Pennsylvania, by smaller margins than Trump, four years later. Trump had already claimed that election was rigged – yet he won. Clinton won the popular vote nationally, but lost Pennsylvania by a little more than 44,000 votes.
She did not plot with President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden to overturn a close election.
No one, except the winner, claimed votes were “rigged.” No
one suggested stopping the counts while Clinton was ahead in key states.
Sadly, to admit defeat was not the Trump Way. To face reality, even, is not the Trump Way. So, on November 23, a challenge filed by Trump lawyers to stop the certification of the electoral vote in Pennsylvania was blow out of the water in federal court. U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Brann described their challenge as an attempt to disenfranchise almost 7 million voters.
“One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption,” he noted. “That has not happened.”
So, in three states, Trump was defeated at the polls. Then he was defeated by honest election officials and others.
Then he was defeated in the courts.
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