By Jonathan Turley
We have been discussing the campaign of The Lincoln Project and others to harass and abuse lawyers who represent the Trump campaign or other parties bringing election challenges. Similar campaigns have targeted election officials who object to counting irregularities. Now, the Michigan Attorney General and others are suggesting that Republicans who oppose certification or even meet with President Donald Trump on the issue could be criminally investigated or charged. Once again, the media is silent on this clearly abusive use of the criminal code target members of the opposing party in their raising objections under state law.
On Friday afternoon, leaders of Michigan’s Republican-controlled state legislature met with Trump in the White House at his invitation. My column today explores the difficulty in any strategy to trigger an electoral college fight. However, the objections from legislators could focus on an host of sworn complaints from voters or irregularities in voting counts. I remain skeptical of the sweeping claims made by some Trump lawyers and I was highly critical of Rudy Giuliani’s global communist conspiracy claim at the press conference this week. State legislators have a right to raise electoral objections and seek resolution in the legislative branch.
According to the Washington Post, Dana Nessel “is conferring with election law experts on whether officials may have violated any state laws prohibiting them from engaging in bribery, perjury and conspiracy.” It is same weaponization of the criminal code for political purposes that we have seen in the last four years against Trump. Notably, the focus is the same discredited interpretation used against Trump and notably not adopted by the impeachment-eager House Judiciary Committee: bribery.
In Politico, Richard Primus wrote that these legislators should not attend a meeting with Trump because “it threatens the two Michigan legislators, personally, with the risk of criminal investigation.” This ridiculous legal claims is based on the bribery theory:
The danger for Shirkey and Chatfield, then, is that they are being visibly invited to a meeting where the likely agenda involves the felony of attempting to bribe a public official.
Under Michigan law, any member of the Legislature who “corruptly” accepts a promise of some beneficial act in return for exercising his authority in a certain way is “forever disqualified to hold any public office” and “shall be guilty of a felony, punishable by imprisonment in the state prison not more than 10 years[.]”
We repeatedly discussed this theory during the Trump presidency. As I have previously written, a leading proponent has been former prosecutor and Washington Post columnist Randall D. Eliason, who insisted that “allegations of a wrongful quid pro quo are really just another way of saying that there was a bribe … it’s bribery if a quid pro quo is sought with corrupt intent, if the president is not pursuing legitimate U.S. policy but instead is wrongfully demanding actions by Ukraine that would benefit him personally.” Eliason further endorsed the House report and assured that “The legal and factual analysis of bribery and honest services fraud in the House report is exactly right” and “outlines compelling evidence of federal criminal violations.”
The theory was never “exactly” or even remotely right, as evidenced by the decision not to use it as a basis for impeachment. And yet, it’s back. Indeed, the greatest danger of the theory was not that it would ever pass muster in the federal court system but that it would be used (as here) in the political system to criminalize policy and legal disagreements. (Eliason recently defended the attacks on fellow lawyers who are represented those challenging election results or practices).
In my testimony, I went into historical and legal detail to explain why this theory was never credible. While it was gleefully presented by papers like the Washington Post, it ignored case law that rejected precisely this type of limitless definition of the offense.
Its the Governor of Michigan who should be arrested for forcing restrictions on the whole state and the citizens these Democrat Tyrants need removed from office and sent to prison
@Spurwing Plover:
Every one of the Lincoln Project attorneys (Conway being one of them) should have Bar Association charges brought against them and their license to practice law suspended. And doxxing should be made a federal offense so that it transpires state borders.
Of course, WaPo hack Nessel has no idea what happened in a meeting in the White House but if it is possible to cast doubt on Republican legislators in the mind of Nessel’s readers, Mission Accomplished. Mental midgets like Comrade Greggie will suck it up and insist that those legislators violated election law.
What is the philosophy behind all this? Ummm, Rules For Radicals seem to come to mind. Saul Alinsky, while a Communist, was not stupid, nor was Gramsci that Alinsky based his “Rules” on.
Remember, Eric Holder, the most crooked AG this nation has ever known, said “They go low, we kick them.” Well, the left is going low and now is the time that the American people kick them, right square in the cajones.
Trump is the bad apple that is rotting the entire republican barrel. It has reached the point where some people would kill democracy to keep the contamination. The choice was never between Trump and Biden. It was between Trump and America.
Choosing to follow the laws that you’ve sworn to uphold and the dictates of your conscience rather than submitting to the will of one who as little regard for either should not result in punishment. That it does is a clear warning that something has been and is still seriously wrong in high places.
November 21, 2020 – Georgia’s pro-Trump election chief is now considered a pariah inside the GOP
@Greg:
You approve election fraud if it produces your goal, and the goal of your fellow Communists in the Democrat Party, of removing Trump from office. You are more than willing to accept a doddering, senile old man in his place because you know he can be manipulated to do what the far left, like the Squad, wants.
What is really sad is that you will accept any liberal propaganda coming from outlets like XiNN.
I consider you an enemy of the American people. You should be strung up and left for the buzzards.
Pinocchio on Pleasure Island you know what happens to little boys sent to Pleasure Island? Their turned into Donkeys and forced to work in the Coal Mines for the rest of their lives
Like Trump, you lie about and attempt to defame anyone you regard as a political enemy.
The GOP has purged the wrong people. That’s what comes of following the wrong sort of leader. They should have figured this out a long time ago.
@Greg:
Excuse me, Comrade Greggie, but you seem to have confused me with someone who has not been reading your obsessive, virulent screeds about President Trump for over four years. I don’t need to defame you, Comrade Greggie. You have done a superior job of doing that to yourself.
Do I consider you an enemy? Absolutely, but not a political enemy but an enemy of my nation, the United States of America.
And who would those wrong people be? The globalists that you on the radical left love so deeply? You can’t even lay the blame for the Chi-Com flu where it belongs, on China.
What you can’t seem to figure out is that minorities are waking up to the decades of lies they have been told, and the things they have been promised that never came to fruition from the left wing of American politicians. Things are changing, Comrade Greggie, and now the left will finally reap what it has sown. I promise you, you ain’t gonna like it.
You’ve been a Trump cultist for over four years. The conversion coincided with Ted Cruz’s public whipping, humiliation, and subsequent kissing of Donald’s ring. I don’t recall you having been quite so insulting prior to that.
@Greg:
That’s pretty funny you calling anyone a “cultist” when you would have been Obama’s buttboy for free, not to mention you subscribe to the cult of China apologists.
What conversation? The one that goes on in your head? I love how your fingers writes a check your a$$ can’t cover.
As to your animosity toward Ted Cruz; does it upset you that he burns Ilhan Omar, the Islamist, on a regular basis when she tries to outsmart Senator Cruz? At least he never married his sister like Omar married her own brother just to gain financially. Then divorced him, married her baby daddy, cheated on him an married another guy as she funnels MILLIONS OF $$ INTO HIS COMPANY.
Cultist? That’s all you’ve got? Sorry, Comrade Greggie, I am not into Grecian columns like you are.
@retire05:
What does that mean?
@retire05, #9:
No conversation. Maybe a new pair reading galoshes would be helpful.
@Greg:
Oh, but wait; here is what you said:
So now you’re backtracking and saying there was no conversation. Typical of you, Comrade Greggie. Again, your fingers are writing a check your a$$ can’t cash.
@retire05, #12:
con·ver·sion /kənˈvərZHən/ – the fact of changing one’s religion or beliefs or the action of persuading someone else to change theirs.
@Greg:
Unlike you, English is not my second language.
So, where is the “conversation” you claim went on that you tacitly implied I was involved in?
Put up or shut up.