Donald Trump did everything but confess, in a Sunday-night interview with Fox News MAGA sycophant Mark Levin, to interfering with the 2020 presidential election.
“Whoever heard you get indicted for interfering with a presidential election, where you have every right to do it?” Trump told Levin, as the ex-president, who faces a federal indictment over the effort that he directed to overturn the 2020 election results, tried to brag about his poll numbers, because of course that’s what he was doing.
This should make special prosecutor Jack Smith’s job that much easier when he finally gets to try his case in front of a federal jury next year.
Donald Trump
- Donald Trump thinks schools make kids trans: Do you need this fact-checked?
- Donald Trump flip-flops, decides he’s now for Florida’s six-week abortion ban
- Trump now appears to blame parents of dead soldiers for Arlington National Cemetery fiasco
- Old man Donald Trump rambles about ‘bacon,’ the ‘wind,’ at town hall
- Former Donald Trump lawyer: Ex-president faces ‘six to nine years’ in 2020 election case
Notably, this Levin guy, handed a confession, didn’t push back at Trump, even to try to get Trump to walk back what he had just said.
Note to MAGA: this isn’t what you call an “interview,” when a subject confesses to a federal crime, and the other person in the conversation shrugs and says, OK.
Fun fact: this Levin guy, according to his bio, is supposedly a lawyer.
Another fun fact: he was also a Never Trumper, before he kissed the ring.
If you need this fact-checked, shame on you, but, no, a candidate for president doesn’t have “every right” to interfere in an election.
TrumpWorld filed 62 lawsuits challenging the 2020 election, and lost every one.
That’s the right any candidate has – to challenge the conduct of an election, and results, in a court of law.
Once the courts have had their say, there is no right accorded to a candidate to call a state election official to get them to find more votes, and there is no right enumerated anywhere that allows a candidate to whip up a crowd to overrun the U.S. Capitol to try to stop the certification of an election.
This is the crux of the fresh federal charges against Trump, with a new indictment handed down by Smith last week that addresses the Trump Court’s effort to put its finger on the scale.
The Trump Court ruled in July that Trump is entitled to immunity from criminal prosecution for what it termed “official acts,” and sent the case back to a federal district court to sort out which charges should be allowed to stand.
The editing work visible in the new indictment includes the removal of references to the Justice Department, and the emphasis on Trump using his campaign “to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger and erode public faith in the administration of the election.”
The new indictment also makes the case that Trump got advice on the execution of the scheme by people “acting in a private capacity,” and that none of those who helped craft the plan to overturn the election “were government officials during the conspiracies.”
Smith also adding clarifying language in the new indictment stressing that Trump “had no official responsibilities related to any state’s certification of the election results” and that Trump was acting “not as President but in his capacity as a candidate for office.”
The lawyer hired by the White House to represent Donald Trump during the Mueller 2016 election-interference investigation thinks Trump faces serious prison time from the charges.
“You pointed out 55 years is the exposure. He’s not going to get 55 years, but he’ll get six to nine on this,” former Trump White House attorney Ty Cobb told CNN host Erin Burnett in an interview last week.
Cobb, analyzing the indictment, called it a “very forceful document.”
“It’s pared down, every sentence is, you know, crisply worded. It’s a tight narrative. You can’t read this and not understand the crimes that Trump actually committed,” said Cobb, a former assistant U.S. Attorney in the Reagan administration, and served as a special counsel to the Trump White House for 10 months in 2017-2018.
“I think the people that view this as a some retreat by Smith read this completely wrong,” Cobb said. “This is what happens in the ordinary course. If the Supreme Court takes an action that eliminates one approach that was previously available, the prudent thing to do is to change course.
“The facts haven’t changed, and as you pointed out, the charges haven’t changed. They’re the same charges, and they’re easily proved,” Cobb said.
And that was before Trump confessed over the Fox News cable airwaves.
“This is the banality of evil right here – Trump asserting he can override the will of the voters to claim victory in an election he lost. And he will do it again,” former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance wrote on Twitter after the interview.
The term “banality of evil” dates back to philosopher Hannah Arendt, who coined the phrase in relation to the 1961 trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann for his actions in directing the Holocaust in World War II.
The basic concept of “banality of evil”: evil that becomes so ordinary that we don’t see it for what it is.
Based on the flood of comments we see from MAGA devotees on our Facebook and YouTube pages: yep, checks out.
Video: Did Donald Trump just confess?
Share
Chris Graham
