What to make of this mugshot? Serious as a heart attack? I’d hate to be you on that fateful day? Table turner? Energy shift? Game on? Daddy’s in da house? Good career move? You can run but you can’t hide? Please, Br’er Fox, don’t fling me in that-there briar patch…!
Good luck trying this case, DA Fani Willis. And by all means roll the TV cameras in the courtroom. You are about to supplant the Scopes trial of 1925 as the most notoriously ridiculous piece of legal work in US history. That one, over in Tennessee, was called “the Monkey Trial” when a high school teacher named John Scopes was charged with teaching the theory of evolution in his biology class. It got the national news spotlight for the duration. The state enlisted three-time Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan as a special prosecutor. Poor Bryan, famously sweating in the southern July heat, was made a fool of by Chicago lawyer for the defense Clarence Darrow. Bryan died of a stroke days after the conclusion of the trial. It also killed what remained of his reputation.
This week, DA Willis staged the circus parade of bookings, forcing the large cast of indictees — most of them attorneys for Mr. Trump — to submit to the finger-printing and mugshot ceremony in the county jail, in case any of them had thoughts of decamping to Uruguay. The cable news peanut gallery went berserk with glee at the humiliation of election denial celebrities Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell especially. On Thursday, attorney Kenneth Chesebro, who advised Georgia GOP officials on the process of assembling alternate electors in the case of election fraud under Georgia law, demanded a speedy trial.
Under Georgia’s speedy trial law, Mr. Chesebro’s trial would have to take place this fall. (Such are the guiles of the law.) The Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper called it, “an aggressive filing.” Ms. Willis had hoped to try all 19 defendants together during the 2024 presidential primary season, to support her RICO charges. Meanwhile, three other defendants, including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, filed to have their cases removed to the federal court, in so far as the actions they are accused of taking happened while they worked in the service of the US government. Mr. Meadows is accused of seeking by email to get the phone number of a Pennsylvania election official.
Ms. Willis’s case hinges on a number of novel propositions. First, that it is somehow against the law to object to the outcome of an election. And second, that the process for relief in such a case, as provided in Georgia’s election contest law and the US Electoral Count Act of 1887, does not apply to Mr. Trump and his lawyers. Anyone who intends to challenge the outcome must necessarily assemble a panel of alternate electors if state officials cannot certify the election properly and in good faith. Ms. Willis refers to these erroneously as “fake electors.” Mr. Trump and his co-defendants will necessarily have to present evidence that the Georgia presidential election of 2020 was not certified properly or in good faith.
Will the defendants be allowed to present evidence of serious irregularities in the 2020 Georgia election results? If not, would that not be grounds for dismissal. So far, Democrats in charge of the machinery of law all over the country have skated on mere assertions that the 2020 election was fair. In Georgia, none of the principals involved in the dispute have been subject to cross-examination, the best instrument for truth-finding in the American legal system. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Sec’y of State Brad Raffensperger may not be so hot for an airing of what actually went on Nov 3, 2020 and the days after, especially the validity of over 100,000 mail-in ballots in a state where “Joe Biden’s” margin of victory was a mere 11,799 votes.
Mr. Trump seems to be thriving under the tribulation of four court cases brought against him as he runs for election in 2024. Each new set of charges boosts his poll numbers. It helps him hugely that the cases are transparently idiotic and mendacious. If he is initially convicted in any of them, he can still run for president and be elected, even if he’s jailed — as Eugene Debs did in 1920 getting 913,693 votes running on the Socialist Party from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he was jailed under the 1917 Espionage Act for speaking out against America’s entry into the First World War.
The Party of Chaos is running scared. Everybody knows that “Joe Biden” can’t possibly run for another term and yet the public debate is so grotesquely disabled that nobody will talk about it. Most particularly, they will not talk about who might take his place. All they are really demonstrating with this barrage of prosecutions against their chief adversary is how broken, craven, and degenerate the party is, and what a menace it is, as they like to say, to our democracy.