NEW: Just Released “Meadows Files” Confirm the Rotten Fruits of Donald Trump’s September 2020—Yes, September 2020—Election-Theft Plot
NEW: Just Released “Meadows Files” Confirm the Rotten Fruits of Donald Trump’s September 2020—Yes, September 2020—Election-Theft Plot
Many Americans have forgotten that perhaps Trump’s most egregious pre-election statement about the 2020 vote didn’t involve asking China for illegal aid, but inciting Americans to commit voter fraud.
NEW: Just Released “Meadows Files” Confirm the Rotten Fruits of Donald Trump’s September 2020—Yes, September 2020—Election-Theft Plot
Introduction
In early September 2020, Donald Trump made his most stunning public statement about the 2020 presidential election—and that’s saying something, given that he at one point publicly asked the Chinese Communist Party to illegally aid his campaign.
{Note: He also repeated this urgent request privately, according to former NSA John Bolton.}
As the New York Times reports, on September 2, 2020, Trump stunned journalists on an airport tarmac in North Carolina by using a nationally televised press availability to urge voters (presumably in particular those Republican Party voters likely to listen to his public entreaties) to commit voter fraud—specifically, the serious federal felony of deliberately voting more than once. Needless to say, double-voting inflates the vote count for the candidate for whom it’s done and can invalidate election-day vote tallies.
{Note: Under 52 U.S. Code § 20511, it is even a federal crime to “knowingly and willfully deprive the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process by the procurement [including soliciting] of ballots that are known by the person to be materially fraudulent.” So voter fraud can definitely inculpate more than just the voter who commits it. And needless to say, voter fraud can also run afoul of Solicitation and/or Conspiracy statutes under the federal criminal code.}
Trump’s public incitement to felonious conduct was particularly striking for a GOP candidate who had long bemoaned (falsely and without any evidence whatsoever) the supposed ubiquity of voter fraud in U.S. elections. But on September 2 of an election year, just two months from Election Day, Trump used a particular rhetorical flourish that he must have believed would protect him from a federal indictment for soliciting federal crimes: he claimed he was suggesting mass Republican voter fraud purely as a way to test America’s elections system.
It goes without saying that Trump’s proffered “fig leaf” of reasonability was farcical.
Indeed, Trump knew that if any significant number of U.S. voters double-voted on Election Day in 2020, whether these voters were Republicans or Democrats or a mix of the two, not only would they (not he) face imminent legal consequences for doing so but—more importantly—it wouldn’t matter for whom the fraudulent votes had been cast, as even if only a small number of voters were caught double-voting (at Trump’s behest) it would give the GOP candidate a new talking point: mail-in voting can’t be trusted, and indeed all mail-in votes (votes that favor Democrats historically, and particularly since Trump systematically sought to convince his own voters to only vote in person) must be thrown out, as if anyone can vote by mail and in person, surely everyone can.