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If they hang around Donald Trump long enough, people start to believe his lies. And if they’re not careful, they risk going to jail.
That’s the message from Michigan, where Attorney General Dana Nessel announced Tuesday that she had filed conspiracy and forgery charges against 16 people who allegedly signed paperwork falsely asserting that Trump had won the 2020 election.
What happened exactly? First, you have to understand that these events involved the Electoral College, which technically elects presidents, and also that they took place against the backdrop of Trump claiming that the election had been stolen from him in Michigan and elsewhere.
[ Mark Weisbrot: If Donald Trump loses the GOP primary, will his supporters shun the nominee? ]
As a result of that big lie, the 16 people allegedly signed official papers declaring themselves to be the rightful “electors” who were supporting the rightful “winner” whose name happened to be Trump. This was all part of a contingency plan if Trump got his wish and Congress voted to not certify the results of an election that had found him to be the loser.
Trump lost. Period. The alleged alternate slate of electors was all total nonsense, a consequence of a criminal delusion. For the record, Joe Biden won Michigan by some 150,000 votes.
Still, this motley crew variously presented these trumped-up papers to the Michigan legislature, Congress and the National Archives, all the while claiming to be part of a righteous alternative slate of Trump electors, according to authorities. In Nessel’s parlance, they thus were “false electors” and people who had committed federal offenses, such as conspiracy to commit election fraud.
“The false electors’ actions undermined the public’s faith in the integrity of our elections,” Nessel said Tuesday, “and not only violated the spirit of the laws enshrining and defending our democracy, but we believe also plainly violated the laws by which we administer our elections in Michigan and peaceably transfer power in America.”
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Nessel is a Democrat, and she clearly and correctly anticipated that Trump would claim that these charges were merely political.
We don’t doubt that Nessel and other Michigan Democrats were delighted to take down Trump, but she has the cold facts on her side. Undermining democratically conducted elections is serious business that risks taking down democracy itself; that is not a political observation but a factual one. As the vast majority of Republicans surely know in their hearts.
Did the people charged take all this stolen election garbage seriously and truly believe that Trump had won the election?
Who knows?
Perhaps some of that will come out in court, and it may well vary from person to person. Certainly, these look like local Republicans who believed what Trump was telling them and allegedly did the bidding of the former president and his inner circle. But we adults have individual responsibility for our actions, and it is hard to believe a judge or a jury would accept “the losing candidate told me to do it” as justification for election fraud.
On Tuesday, the Detroit Free Press reported that those indicted included, among others, Michigan GOP co-chair Meshawn Maddock; Mayra Rodriguez, an attorney; William “Hank” Choate, former chair of the Michigan GOP’s 7th District; Amy Facchinello, a board member of Grand Blanc Community Schools; and Ken Vanderwood, the mayor of Wyoming, Michigan. For the most part, these hardly were political neophytes.
As we saw Jan. 6, 2021, here is another case of how people who had not done anything like this before were persuaded by a huckster, according to authorities, to breach the kind of rules that Americans, including Republicans, long have held sacred. The reality that this very con artist remains a leading Republican candidate for president, without substantial evasive action by that party, boggles the mind.
The announcement in Michigan took place on the same day federal prosecutors made Trump’s legal team aware that the former president is a target of special prosecutor Jack Smith’s investigation into efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. This would appear to indicate another indictment is coming to add to Trump’s legal woes. Unsurprisingly, Trump went on the offensive with news that would have most Americans quaking in their boots: “Deranged Jack Smith, the prosecutor with Joe Biden’s DOJ, sent a letter (again, it was Sunday night!) stating that I am a TARGET of the January 6th grand jury investigation, and giving me a very short 4 days to report to the grand jury, which almost always means an Arrest and Indictment,” Trump said in a lengthy statement on his Truth Social channel.
He went on to call himself “Joe Biden’s NUMBER ONE POLITICAL OPPONENT, who is largely dominating him in the race for the Presidency.”
Chicago Tribune Opinion
That’s all standard Trump blather (although he certainly remains a leading candidate). Our concern here is the 16 deluded Trump apparatchiks: Conspiracy to commit forgery and conspiracy to commit uttering and publishing each are punishable by up to 14 years in prison. Will Trump be paying their legal bills? Will he come visit them behind bars? Will the full power of Mar-a-Lago rise to their defense? We doubt it.
The most interesting question of all is whether the Michigan 16 will now admit to the error of their ways, perhaps by saying the wool was pulled over their eyes by a charlatan.
Elections need laws to protect their integrity, and there have to be consequences when those laws are broken.
All of this has yet to play out in court, and arguments of innocence and maybe deals will be made; there is a case for a moderate, measured response for the good of the union. There is no need for politicized triumphalism.
But on Tuesday, the Michigan attorney general did the right thing.
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