In 2011, Vladimir Putin, at the time prime minister of Russia, criticized U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for meddling in Russian elections. In December of that year, The Guardian reported:
Speaking to supporters on Thursday, Putin accused Clinton of giving “the signal” to opposition leaders, who are expected to gather with tens of thousands of supporters for a protest on Saturday. He rejected Clinton’s repeated criticism of a parliamentary vote last weekend that gave Putin’s United Russia party nearly 50% of the vote amid widespread reports of fraud.
Fast forward to 2023. On August 4th, U.S. News reported that Alexei Navalny, generally considered now-president Vladimir Putin’s most prominent political opponent,
was sentenced on Friday to an additional 19 years in prison after being found guilty on a series of new charges
Navalny is already serving a sentence of 11.5 years “on charges including fraud.”
Two days before Navalny’s most recent sentencing, a special counsel with the United States Department of Justice indicted Donald Trump, the most prominent political opponent of sitting U.S. president Joe Biden. The Department of Justice, which is led by Biden’s cabinet member, Attorney General Merrick Garland, accuses Trump of “conspiracy to defraud the US government” and
of disrupting the peaceful transfer of power by making “knowingly false” voter fraud claims that culminated in the storming of the US Capitol building by hundreds of his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021.
While there are few details on what kind of fraud Alexei Navalny was found guilty of, it is relatively easy to identify the specifics of the same charges against Trump. There is a specific detail that the U.S. prosecutors rely on to lend credibility to the charges against Trump. According to the New York Post report, it is alleged that Trump “supported a scheme to put forward fraudulent electors” to determine the outcome of the 2020 election.
To understand the point here, we need to remember how the United States Constitution specifies that an American president is elected. There are six steps involved:
1. In a general election, eligible voters cast one and only one vote each;
2. The eligible votes are counted state by state;
3. Each state is allotted a number of electors based on population; the electors are members of the so-called electoral college;
4. The presidential candidate with the most votes in one state wins all of the electors in that state;
5. The electoral college meets in Washington, D.C., to formally cast the vote for president;
6. Congress certifies the electoral college vote.
The reference to electors in the Trump indictment alleges that the former president was somehow trying to replace electors in at least one state. This state is presumably Georgia, which Biden won. Trump was convinced that he had won more votes than Biden; given the well-documented election irregularities in Fulton County in Georgia, Trump had good reasons to at least raise concerns about the vote count in the state as a whole.
This brings us to the gist of the latest indictment against him. There are two interpretations of it, one that is benevolent toward the U.S. Department of Justice, DOJ, and one that is not.
The benevolent interpretation says that the DOJ has verifiable reasons to believe that Trump was trying to have the state replace its own electors with others that were favorable to him. The goal would be to shift the majority of the Georgia delegation to the electoral college so that it would vote for Trump at its meeting in Washington, DC.
In short: the DOJ’s special counsel would allege that Trump had found a mechanism by means of which he could coerce the Georgia Secretary of State into seating his electors instead of those that the state appointed.
I am, of course, no expert on the legal mechanics of how electors are appointed on a state-by-state basis. However, generally speaking, it seems extremely far-fetched that the sitting president would have the power to do this. The process for seating the electors is entirely subject to state law and gives no room for the federal government to be involved. The sitting president has no influence over the process whatsoever. His only recourse would be to try to convince the state official responsible for certifying the electors—that would again be each state’s own secretary of state—to act as the president would see fit.
How exactly would President Trump have done this? Constitutionally, the state government in Georgia is at least as independent of the U.S. government as any EU member state is of the government of the European Union.
This question does not appear to have an intelligible answer. Therefore, we turn to the less-benevolent interpretation of the indictment of Trump. It appears to suggest that Trump committed the act of conspiracy to defraud the United States government by talking to the secretary of state in Georgia—there is a documented phone call—about the electors that his state would send to the electoral college. Presumably, Trump had this conversation because he was convinced that the election in Georgia was fraudulent in some way.
In other words, Trump would have expressed an opinion about the legitimacy of the election. As mentioned earlier, the election in at least one county in Georgia was far from clean, which gives a candidate affected by those election irregularities good reasons to initially question the outcome of the election. (Anyone who claims otherwise should run for office under the same circumstances and prove that he or she has a stronger character than Trump.)
If this is indeed the correct interpretation of what Trump is being charged with, then the indictment opens an ominous dimension in American politics that we have never seen before. It puts the U.S. government on a dangerous collision course with the First Amendment of the Constitution. If a person can be charged with a crime for expressing an opinion regarding the legitimacy of an election, what other crimes of opinion can we be charged with?
Or, in the words of Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch:
The Biden administration has left the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution behind with its latest indictment of President Trump for daring to dispute the 2020 presidential election, as is his God-given right as president, a citizen, and a candidate under state, federal and constitutional law. … Let’s be blunt: This indictment is a naked threat and an act of intimidation by the Democratic Party against any and all their political opponents. The message from the Biden regime is: “We will put you in jail if you dispute elections.”
This is a dramatic point, but it is a valid one. If I believe that I see fraud in next year’s election, do I dare to speak up about it? If I do, will I be charged with a crime for doing so?
One person who already has good reasons to ask himself these questions is writer and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza. Will he be charged with the same crime as Trump has been charged with for making the movie 2000 Mules? After all, D’Souza explains credibly how an organized group could have committed voter fraud at a scale that would have tipped the 2020 election in Biden’s favor. He even goes so far as to suggest that such fraud happened and that it was enough to tip the election in Biden’s favor.
I was not convinced all the way by D’Souza’s film, but that is beside the point. I found his film to be compelling and credible enough to encourage all my readers to see it and to make up their own minds.
Given the likely collision course between the Trump indictment and the First Amendment, is my encouragement to people to see D’Souza’s film now a crime? Am I now guilty of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government?
Are we now at a point where the very debate over election integrity has been criminalized?
That remains to be seen, of course. The court system has not had its say in the case against Trump, and the Supreme Court has not had an opportunity to determine whether or not the mere questioning of election integrity is an act protected by the First Amendment. If I were to take a guess, I would say, if given a chance, they will land on the side of the First Amendment, but until then, we need to consider the ghastly can of worms that this indictment opens.
The indictment makes it look as if President Biden, like President Putin, is trying to silence a political opponent. If the latter is legitimately called a totalitarian, then the former is now liable to be called the same. I am not going to go that far—I do not yet believe that the Biden administration has downright totalitarian ambitions—but as Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch alludes to, the line between a free and democratic country on the one hand and a rogue totalitarian nation on the other depends critically on the protection of free speech.
Those who blur that line but do not harbor totalitarian ambitions are well advised to explain exactly what it is they are doing. If they do not, they risk compromising the very constitutional integrity they claim to be defending.
John Daniel Davidson over at The Federalist goes even further:
The idea that our Justice Department can indict someone, especially the sitting president’s main political rival, over speech that’s protected by the First Amendment is simply insane. It puts us firmly into banana republic territory, where tinpot dictators jail their political opponents ahead of election day to ensure their “reelection.”
This also means that the U.S. government is losing its legitimacy in sanctioning countries around the world for the non-democratic behavior of their governments.
To this point, the comments by Tom Fitton were picked up by the Russian news agency Sputnik International. In a dryly humorous conclusion to their article, they note:
Trump’s latest indictment comes at an interesting time in the 2024 campaign, with recent polling showing him at 45 percent support compared with 40 percent for Biden if elections were held today.
Along the same lines, Breitbart News explained:
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of former President Donald Trump on Tuesday matched what has become a familiar pattern: Trump is indicted on the same day as, or the day after, bad legal news emerges about President Joe Biden and his family.
They go on to present a list of four indictments against Trump, which were all timed to smother any possible media attention to news about serious wrongdoings by the Biden administration.
This pattern is as troubling as it is undeniable, especially given the news that broke this week, right before the latest indictment against Trump. On Monday, New York Post reported that a man named Devon Archer, the former business associate of President Biden’s son Hunter,
told Congress Monday that Hunter referred to President Biden as “my guy” while connecting his dad to foreign associates nearly two dozen times … Archer said during a four-hour House Oversight Committee interview that Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings paid Hunter up to $1 million per year to serve on its board because of his family’s “brand.”
The president’s son was selling political influence, something that not even the FBI can ignore anymore. In fact, the corruption allegations against the Biden family have now risen to the point where the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives is looking at a formal impeachment inquiry into President Biden.
How will all this end? Will Trump share Alexei Navalny’s fate and end up in jail?
Will President Biden take another cue from Moscow and try to rally the people behind himself by, say, launching a special military operation somewhere?
Trump, Navalny, Biden, Putin, and 2024
In 2011, Vladimir Putin, at the time prime minister of Russia, criticized U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for meddling in Russian elections. In December of that year, The Guardian reported:
Fast forward to 2023. On August 4th, U.S. News reported that Alexei Navalny, generally considered now-president Vladimir Putin’s most prominent political opponent,
Navalny is already serving a sentence of 11.5 years “on charges including fraud.”
Two days before Navalny’s most recent sentencing, a special counsel with the United States Department of Justice indicted Donald Trump, the most prominent political opponent of sitting U.S. president Joe Biden. The Department of Justice, which is led by Biden’s cabinet member, Attorney General Merrick Garland, accuses Trump of “conspiracy to defraud the US government” and
While there are few details on what kind of fraud Alexei Navalny was found guilty of, it is relatively easy to identify the specifics of the same charges against Trump. There is a specific detail that the U.S. prosecutors rely on to lend credibility to the charges against Trump. According to the New York Post report, it is alleged that Trump “supported a scheme to put forward fraudulent electors” to determine the outcome of the 2020 election.
To understand the point here, we need to remember how the United States Constitution specifies that an American president is elected. There are six steps involved:
1. In a general election, eligible voters cast one and only one vote each;
2. The eligible votes are counted state by state;
3. Each state is allotted a number of electors based on population; the electors are members of the so-called electoral college;
4. The presidential candidate with the most votes in one state wins all of the electors in that state;
5. The electoral college meets in Washington, D.C., to formally cast the vote for president;
6. Congress certifies the electoral college vote.
The reference to electors in the Trump indictment alleges that the former president was somehow trying to replace electors in at least one state. This state is presumably Georgia, which Biden won. Trump was convinced that he had won more votes than Biden; given the well-documented election irregularities in Fulton County in Georgia, Trump had good reasons to at least raise concerns about the vote count in the state as a whole.
This brings us to the gist of the latest indictment against him. There are two interpretations of it, one that is benevolent toward the U.S. Department of Justice, DOJ, and one that is not.
The benevolent interpretation says that the DOJ has verifiable reasons to believe that Trump was trying to have the state replace its own electors with others that were favorable to him. The goal would be to shift the majority of the Georgia delegation to the electoral college so that it would vote for Trump at its meeting in Washington, DC.
In short: the DOJ’s special counsel would allege that Trump had found a mechanism by means of which he could coerce the Georgia Secretary of State into seating his electors instead of those that the state appointed.
I am, of course, no expert on the legal mechanics of how electors are appointed on a state-by-state basis. However, generally speaking, it seems extremely far-fetched that the sitting president would have the power to do this. The process for seating the electors is entirely subject to state law and gives no room for the federal government to be involved. The sitting president has no influence over the process whatsoever. His only recourse would be to try to convince the state official responsible for certifying the electors—that would again be each state’s own secretary of state—to act as the president would see fit.
How exactly would President Trump have done this? Constitutionally, the state government in Georgia is at least as independent of the U.S. government as any EU member state is of the government of the European Union.
This question does not appear to have an intelligible answer. Therefore, we turn to the less-benevolent interpretation of the indictment of Trump. It appears to suggest that Trump committed the act of conspiracy to defraud the United States government by talking to the secretary of state in Georgia—there is a documented phone call—about the electors that his state would send to the electoral college. Presumably, Trump had this conversation because he was convinced that the election in Georgia was fraudulent in some way.
In other words, Trump would have expressed an opinion about the legitimacy of the election. As mentioned earlier, the election in at least one county in Georgia was far from clean, which gives a candidate affected by those election irregularities good reasons to initially question the outcome of the election. (Anyone who claims otherwise should run for office under the same circumstances and prove that he or she has a stronger character than Trump.)
If this is indeed the correct interpretation of what Trump is being charged with, then the indictment opens an ominous dimension in American politics that we have never seen before. It puts the U.S. government on a dangerous collision course with the First Amendment of the Constitution. If a person can be charged with a crime for expressing an opinion regarding the legitimacy of an election, what other crimes of opinion can we be charged with?
Or, in the words of Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch:
This is a dramatic point, but it is a valid one. If I believe that I see fraud in next year’s election, do I dare to speak up about it? If I do, will I be charged with a crime for doing so?
One person who already has good reasons to ask himself these questions is writer and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza. Will he be charged with the same crime as Trump has been charged with for making the movie 2000 Mules? After all, D’Souza explains credibly how an organized group could have committed voter fraud at a scale that would have tipped the 2020 election in Biden’s favor. He even goes so far as to suggest that such fraud happened and that it was enough to tip the election in Biden’s favor.
I was not convinced all the way by D’Souza’s film, but that is beside the point. I found his film to be compelling and credible enough to encourage all my readers to see it and to make up their own minds.
Given the likely collision course between the Trump indictment and the First Amendment, is my encouragement to people to see D’Souza’s film now a crime? Am I now guilty of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government?
Are we now at a point where the very debate over election integrity has been criminalized?
That remains to be seen, of course. The court system has not had its say in the case against Trump, and the Supreme Court has not had an opportunity to determine whether or not the mere questioning of election integrity is an act protected by the First Amendment. If I were to take a guess, I would say, if given a chance, they will land on the side of the First Amendment, but until then, we need to consider the ghastly can of worms that this indictment opens.
The indictment makes it look as if President Biden, like President Putin, is trying to silence a political opponent. If the latter is legitimately called a totalitarian, then the former is now liable to be called the same. I am not going to go that far—I do not yet believe that the Biden administration has downright totalitarian ambitions—but as Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch alludes to, the line between a free and democratic country on the one hand and a rogue totalitarian nation on the other depends critically on the protection of free speech.
Those who blur that line but do not harbor totalitarian ambitions are well advised to explain exactly what it is they are doing. If they do not, they risk compromising the very constitutional integrity they claim to be defending.
John Daniel Davidson over at The Federalist goes even further:
This also means that the U.S. government is losing its legitimacy in sanctioning countries around the world for the non-democratic behavior of their governments.
To this point, the comments by Tom Fitton were picked up by the Russian news agency Sputnik International. In a dryly humorous conclusion to their article, they note:
Along the same lines, Breitbart News explained:
They go on to present a list of four indictments against Trump, which were all timed to smother any possible media attention to news about serious wrongdoings by the Biden administration.
This pattern is as troubling as it is undeniable, especially given the news that broke this week, right before the latest indictment against Trump. On Monday, New York Post reported that a man named Devon Archer, the former business associate of President Biden’s son Hunter,
The president’s son was selling political influence, something that not even the FBI can ignore anymore. In fact, the corruption allegations against the Biden family have now risen to the point where the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives is looking at a formal impeachment inquiry into President Biden.
How will all this end? Will Trump share Alexei Navalny’s fate and end up in jail?
Will President Biden take another cue from Moscow and try to rally the people behind himself by, say, launching a special military operation somewhere?
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