To Crack Open the Big 2020 Election Scheme, Start by
Prosecuting the Fake Electors
Trump’s Watergate?
JANUARY 19, 2022 5:30 AM
Shortly after midnight
on June 17, 1972, an alert security guard at the Watergate complex in
Washington, D.C. noticed something amiss. Someone had placed tape over the
locks on doors leading from the complex’s underground garage to the office
building. The guard thought little of it, so he removed the tape and went about
his business. When he returned a short time later, however, he discovered that
someone had re-taped the locks. This time he called the police. Three
plainclothes officers working the overnight “bum squad” responded and promptly
arrested five hapless burglars whose bumbling lookout man had been distracted
watching The Attack of the Puppet People on the television in
his hotel room across the street.
Over the next two years,
the investigation of this mundane burglary—and relentless press coverage—led to
the convictions of not only the burglars but of a total of 48 people, many of
them top officials in the Nixon administration, not to mention the resignation
of the president of the United States.
To paraphrase an old
English proverb, mighty consequences from small offenses sometimes grow.
Now, an offense
committed by relatively unknown people acting at the state level could grow
into “Trump’s Watergate.” Of course Trump, unlike Nixon, is already out of
office, but he has other worries—like protecting his fortune, keeping the door
open to run again in 2024, and staying out of jail.
If state and federal law
enforcement authorities convene grand juries to investigate the low-level GOP
officials who signed and submitted phony electoral certificates in the 2020
election, the entire conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election could unravel.
So far, there has been no visible indication that
Attorney General Merrick Garland has any appetite to launch a sweeping
investigation into Team Trump’s conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020
election. Garland has said nothing about it. His silence could just be
prudential—it can be unwise for a prosecutor to alert prematurely the subjects
of investigations. Or he may be reluctant to pursue such a case at all, perhaps
due to some combination of his cautious nature, fear that it might be perceived
as partisan political retribution, the difficulty of drawing clear lines
between protected speech and conspiracy, and the difficulty of proving criminal
intent in the mind of a cult figure whose bizarre mental state is unfathomable.
But none of those
inhibitions should apply to a routine investigation into the mundane crimes
implicated by the creation, execution and submission to the government of phony
electoral documents. Quite the opposite: The failure to
investigate that kind of obvious election fraud would smack of political
calculation.
Law enforcement
officials investigating the phony documents, as distinguished from a broader
conspiracy, would not have to search for a crime—they already have the smoking
guns, documents that are fraudulent on their face. Nor would they need to
search for the culprits. The fraudsters signed their names to the phony
documents, many of them proudly recording the act on video.
This open-and-shut
election fraud is a gift to Garland and his federal prosecutors. Without having
to expend any political capital by opening a sweeping investigation targeting
Donald Trump or those around him, prosecutors could chip away at the broader
conspiracy.
The targets of the
investigation would be the people who signed and transmitted the phony elector
certificates, not Donald Trump.
A total of 59
individuals from five states signed the documents. We know virtually nothing
about them. They are not national figures, and largely are not public figures,
except perhaps in state and local circles. They seem to be a fairly
representative sample of Americans with quotidian jobs, nice families, and cute
pets—not hardened denizens of the criminal underworld.
Can you imagine what
would happen if 59 otherwise respectable burghers were hauled before a grand
jury, facing a very real prospect of going to jail? How long do you think it
would take for some or all of them to seek plea deals that would keep them out
of prison? How quickly will they line up to identify those who told them to do
it?
In very short order,
investigators would have a mountain of testimony identifying every single
person who induced or aided and abetted the pseudo-electors in the planning,
coordination, and execution of their fraudulent acts. And so on up the chain.
As far as it goes.
And it seems to go far:
Historian Heather Cox
Richardson, writing in her January 17 newsletter, lays it all out in
detail, leading to the inescapable conclusion that the scheme “appears to have
been a coordinated attempt by members of the Trump administration and
sympathizers around the country to overturn our government by committing
election fraud.”
When the last person
compelled to testify has had his or her time in the barrel before a grand jury,
what started as a politically impeccable investigation of a mundane crime
committed by nondescript individuals—like the investigation of the five
Watergate burglars—could bring down the whole edifice.
Is it too much to hope
for that the simple act of investigating a mundane fraudulent act could lead to
widespread accountability in Trump World? Let’s find out. All it will take is
for the Department of Justice to begin an investigation—for Attorney General
Garland to prosecute the obvious crime right in front of him—and then to follow
the facts upward as far as they go.