REX TILLERSON DID CORRECTLY CALL THE PRESIDENT AS HE SAW HIM

 WHY ISN’T THE FORMER PRESIDENT BEING INDICTED FOR HIS INTENT

 

…Richard Donoghue, Deputy A.G. that wrote incriminating notes from a phone call from then President Trump

 

There seems to be hard evidence that the former president should be indicted

 

When legal gurus and former prosecutors discuss a potential criminal investigation and indictment of former president, Donald Trump, concerning efforts to stage an insurrection, the biggest hurdle they cite is “intent.”

Why not investigate and indict Trump for his phone call to Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger?  Why not indict him for his demand that Raffenspergerhe “find” enough votes to deliver the state to Trump? 

Well, this essentially says he intended to falsify the vote tabulation.  Well, Trump might have actually thought he won.  One could argue he was just encouraging Raffensperger to do his job rigorously.

Why not investigate and indict Trump for inciting an insurrection? Why not indict him for demanding that Justice Department employees falsify voting results in violation of Section 20511 of the U.S. code?

Again, maybe Trump thought he really won and didn’t actually want to overthrow the results.

Imagine if we had evidence that Trump knew there was no fraud and knew he could not get officials to change the result, but he wanted to lay the predicate for an insurrection, even a violent one.

Sounds impossible to find such incriminating, airtight evidence, right?

Well, consider what The New York Times reported last week, regarding a phone call Trump made on Dec. 27:

Mr. Trump pressed the acting attorney general at the time, Jeffrey Rosen, and his deputy, Richard Donoghue, on voter fraud claims that the Justice Department had found no evidence. Mr. Donoghue warned that the department had no power to change the outcome of the election.  Mr. Trump replied that he did not expect that.  This is according to the notes Mr. Donoghue took memorializing the conversation.

“Just say that the election was corrupt, leave the rest to me and to congressional allies, Mr. Donoghue wrote in summarizing Mr. Trump’s response. ...

The phone call by Mr. Trump was perhaps the most audacious moment in a month’s long pressure campaign aimed at enlisting the Justice Department in his crusade to overturn the election results.

Justice Department officials told him there is no widespread fraud. “You guys may not be following the Internet the way I do,” Trump insisted. Still, the department’s lawyers, according to Donoghues notes, “Told him flat out, that much of the info he is getting is false, is just not supported by the evidence,  we looked at allegations but they do not pan out.”

Former House Intelligence Committee counsel Dan Goldman tells us, “Trump’s statements to Rosen, Donoghue, and likely others, demonstrate that he knew he did not have true concerns about the legitimacy of the election but he simply wanted to corruptly overturn it without any factual basis.” Goldman explains, “By [Trump] asking DOJ to lie so he and the Republican congressmen can use the lie to reverse the outcome of the election, Trump plainly intended to corruptly overturn the election. Any state or federal prosecutor can use these statements against him.”

Isn’t that cases of intent?

The Trump phone call to the DOJ took place 10 days before the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally, when Trump implored the mob, whom he had already convinced that the election was stolen, to march on the Capitol just as Congress was tabulating the electoral college votes. Goldman points out, “[One] of the open questions after Impeachment 2.0 was whether and to what extent Trump was aware of the plans to violently storm the Capitol that existed online before January 6.”

However, through his admission in his conversation with the Justice Department attorneys “that he’s very familiar with what is on the Internet, Trump helps prosecutors show that he knew of those plans when he incited the crowd to ‘fight’ and go to the Capitol on January 6. This is powerful proof that he conspired with the rioters to interfere in the lawful functioning of Congress.”

Trump knew there was zero evidence of fraud, both when he pressured Raffensperger and when he incited the crowd. Just as he did when he demanded the Ukrainian president announce an investigation into then-candidate Joe Biden or his son, he was asking the Justice Department, not for evidence, but an action that is not the real reason. He did not even expect the department to change the results; he just wanted it to promulgate his lie so he could finagle a way to reverse the results. He was looking for any pretense to force the reversal of the election.

As constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells us, “Everything he said and did after that Dec. 27 conversation, including strong-arming Raffensperger and pressuring [Vice President Mike] Pence, appears in a different and more damning light.  He adds “That the revelation establishes Trump’s intention to hold onto power regardless of the actual election results.”

Remarkably, the Justice Department notes are not the only instance showing Trump’s desperation to hold onto the presidency despite a lack of evidence of fraud.

Norm Eisen, former co-counsel for the House Judiciary Committee during the first impeachment, explains: “These notes are part of a pattern of behavior by Trump that proves he knew he had not really won the election and was trying to seize an outcome unsupported by the facts. That in turn goes to the bad intent prosecutors investigating Trump for election interference will have to prove.”

That pattern includes his 2019 call to the Ukrainian president and his call to Raffensperger, which Eisen says “are expressions of a person who doesn’t care about the underlying evidence or truths and who wants false public declarations by officials that he can corruptly use to drive the Big Lie.”

Hurdles in proving intent arise in many criminal cases, yet juries often accept circumstantial evidence that is far less damning than the recording of the Trump-Raffensperger call and the Justice Department notes. It’s almost as if this once-in-a-lifetime incriminating evidence has been served on a platter for prosecutors.

Moreover, since the Justice Department has already held that overthrowing an election is outside the scope of “any” official duties, Trump has no special protection for his actions. If “no one is above the law” is to have any meaning, he must be subject to a vigorous federal investigation.

 The proof is starkly before everyone’s eyes.  Yet, there doesn’t seem to be any official with the courage to take on what’s right before their eyes.

Copyright G. Ater 2021