Shortly before the deadly MAGA insurrection on Capitol Hill, 2020 election loser Donald Trump infamously ordered Georgia election overseer Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes,” just enough votes to propel him to statewide victory over Joe Biden.
Trump – circling the drain, his power on the wane – justified his demand with a laundry list of allegations of how Biden had supposedly stolen the state via election fraud.
On the phone call, recorded for posterity, Trump shared his various fraud theories, framing them as fact. Among other things, he claimed the Dominion voting machine company had disassembled and hidden crooked machinery; that hundreds of thousands of Trump ballots were burned or shredded (in his words, “that’s what the rumor is”); that 300,000 ballots were dropped mysteriously into the rolls; that 4,925 voters came from out of state; that 18,000 fake votes for Joe Biden arrived in “what looked to be suitcases or trunks, suitcases”; and that “dead people voted and I think the number is close to 5,000 people.”
Well, guess what: A Georgia special grand jury, tasked with investigating whether Trump criminally interfered in the statewide election in a bid to overturn the free and fair results, has finally finished its work after hearing from 75 witnesses. Thursday, a Georgia judge released a few key excerpts of the report; it goes to the DA who may well recommend criminal charges. Lo and behold, check this out:
“We find by a unanimous vote that no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2020 presidential election that could result in overturning that election.”
That doesn’t bode well for Trump. They’re flatly stating that his purported reasons for pressuring Raffensperger – in potential violation of Georgia law – were baldfaced lies.
Nor does it bode well for Trump that the special grand jurors concluded that some of the Trump allies who were subpoenaed to testify might not have been on the up and up:
“...perjury may have been committed. The Grand Jury recommends that the District Attorney seek appropriate indictments for such crimes when the evidence is compelling.”
By the way, Georgia law prohibits “criminal solicitation to commit election fraud” when a person “solicits, requests, commands, importunes or otherwise attempts to cause the other person to engage” in such felonious conduct. Like demanding that the other person “find” 11,780 votes. The demand itself is criminal, under state law, regardless of whether the actual fraud “is consummated.”
And it never was, because Raffensperger stood his ground. On that phone call, he simply told Trump: “Um, we don’t agree that you have won.” Now the special jurors believe this as well.
For what it’s worth, a Trump flak insisted that the special jurors screwed up: “President Trump did absolutely nothing wrong.” I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that the flak’s remark has the proximate value of soiled Kleenex.
Bottom line: The weather is slowly warming for most of us, but – whether it’s courtesy of the probe in Georgia or those in Washington, D.C. and New York City – I’m more confident than ever that, for Trump, winter is coming.
Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com
