Trump’s Failed Attempt to Cling to Power Results in a Federal Indictment - Horowitz
Rób Horowitz, MINDSETTER™
Trump’s Failed Attempt to Cling to Power Results in a Federal Indictment - Horowitz
As the indictment spells out, Mr. Trump is accused of orchestrating three criminal conspiracies. These were, according to federal prosecutors, all “built on the widespread mistrust the Defendant was creating through pervasive and destabilizing lies about election fraud targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation's process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election.”
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Specifically, the criminal conspiracies charged are: 1) “a conspiracy to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified by the federal government, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371; a.” 2). “A conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified (the certification proceeding), in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1512(k);” and 3) “A conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one's vote counted, in violation of 18 U.S.C. 241.”
As the charges and the supporting evidence contained in the indictment make clear, counter to the misleading assertions of the former president’s attorney, John Lauro, as he blanketed the Sunday shows, and Mr. Trump’s congressional allies and media defenders, this case goes far beyond questions of the boundaries of constitutionally protected freedom of speech. It centers on the actions taken by the former president.
Mr. Trump’s own Attorney General Bill Barr, among other legal experts, refuted this threadbare freedom of speech defense: “As the indictment says, they are not attacking his First Amendment right. He can say whatever he wants, he can even lie. He can even tell people that the election was stolen when he knew better,” the former attorney general told Kaitlan Collins on CNN. “But that does not protect you from entering into a conspiracy.”
Similarly, in nearly real-time. Mike Pence refuted Mr. Lauro’s assertion, made previously by other attorneys for the former president, that all President Trump was asking the then vice president to do was to pause the certification to give states the opportunity to do audits of the vote. On Face the Nation, among other venues on Sunday, the former Vice President disputed this version of events, making it clear that Mr. Trump was insisting that he “outright” reject the votes of certain states in the Biden column. "There was no discretion ever given to the vice president in history, nor should there ever be," Pence told Face the Nation. "I had no right to overturn the election and Kamala Harris will have no right to overturn the election when we beat them in 2024."
Mr. Pence echoed the more combative, directly critical tone he has adopted since Trump was charged for illegally attempting to substitute his desire to stay in power for the decision of the American people to replace him. In a statement released by his presidential campaign in the wake of the indictment, the former Vice President said, “Today’s indictment serves as an important reminder: Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be President of the United States. Our country is more important than one man. Our constitution is more important than any one man’s career.
Even before this most recent and arguably most damaging indictment, Donald Trump was an exceedingly weak general election candidate with nearly 6-in-10 Americans viewing him unfavorably in the 538 weighted average of recent polls conducted before he was charged. And an indictment for his illegal efforts to overturn the Georgia results is all but certain to follow in the next several weeks if not this week. This anticipated new indictment will amplify and reinforce the charges in the federal indictment in the court of public opinion.
The weight of all these indictments also creates an opportunity for Mr. Trump’s primary opponents. He is well under 50% in the private polling, which tends to be more accurate, in Iowa and New Hampshire, the locations of the influential first two contests. Further, soft supporters of the former president, no matter how unfairly they may think he is being treated, are open to the argument that it is ill-advised to nominate a candidate who is going to spend 2024 relitigating 2020.
Most importantly, Mike Pence has it right. Mr. Trump’s reckless, plainly unconstitutional, and illegal efforts to throw out the election results, disrupting the peaceful transition of power for the first time in our history, demonstrates his manifest unfitness to occupy the Oval Office.