Susan Shelley: The latest indictment is just another doomed attempt to get Trump

The Shakespearean drama that is Donald Trump’s political career has some people vibrating with pleasure at the thought of the former president dying in a prison cell in the third act.

Trump has been indicted on criminal charges again, this time for his disbelief that he lost the 2020 election and his efforts to execute a plan to challenge the electoral votes of a number of states that allegedly counted illegal ballots.

Special counsel Jack Smith’s 45-page indictment portrays Trump as a diabolical liar, plotting and conspiring to cling to power like some James Bond movie villain. In reality, much about the 2020 election was strange, and many people had doubts about the validity of the vote totals in some of the states.

Under the heading of “strangeness,” there was the COVID lockdown, the summer of rioting and the unprecedented sight of entire city blocks of retail storefronts boarded up ahead of the November election, as if for a hurricane. There were changes to election procedures enacted not by state legislatures, as the U.S. Constitution requires, but by state courts and local election officials. There were vast amounts of cash, hundreds of millions of dollars, routed from the supposedly nonpartisan Chan Zuckerberg Initiative through Democrat-friendly nonprofits to “support” election administration, disproportionately awarded to areas of high Democratic voter registration.

Don’t take my word for it. Time magazine published all the details in a gloating piece titled, “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election.” In it, writer Molly Ball chronicles the events that followed the Nov. 3 election, which media organizations called for Joe Biden on Nov. 7. “It was all very, very strange,” Trump said in early December, “Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.”

Ball writes, “In a way, Trump was right.” She describes “a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” that was “the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans.”

Anyone who attempted to investigate reported problems with election integrity was belittled and demonized. When Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson held a hearing on Dec. 16, 2020, on “Examining Irregularities in the 2020 Election,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer accused him from the Senate floor of “quackery and conspiracy theories” and called the hearing a “ridiculous charade.”

But many serious people took issue with the legal validity of the vote count in some states. Texas filed a lawsuit supported by 17 other states that said Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia “all materially weakened, or did away with, security measures, such as witness or signature verification procedures, required by their respective legislatures.” Changes to the law were made by “executive fiat or friendly lawsuits,” Texas charged, with COVID-19 cited as justification for unconstitutional modifications of the “time, place and manner” of elections.

The lawsuit cited documentation of specific irregularities. In Pennsylvania, for example, a Dec. 4 report by 15 state legislators found that 58,221 ballots were returned before the date they were mailed out, another 51,200 were returned one day after they were mailed out and 9,005 had no mailed date at all. In Wayne County, Michigan, more than 173,000 ballots could not be tied to a registered voter. DeKalb County in Georgia could not locate the required chain-of-custody records for ballots collected from drop boxes. A witness in Wisconsin testified under oath that U.S. Postal Service employees were backdating ballots received after Election Day.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case, rejecting it on the grounds that Texas did not have standing to bring a lawsuit over other states’ elections. However, there is another venue for states to object to other states’ vote counts. That is the Electoral College.

It’s not  “overthrow of the government” to object to the counting of electoral votes from a state that held an allegedly compromised election. More than 100 Republican House members and 13 U.S. senators had announced plans to make lawful objections to counting the electors from six states in which election laws were changed by individuals or entities that were not the state legislatures.

So it wasn’t just Trump and it wasn’t a conspiracy. A lot of people thought some of the state legislatures should have the opportunity, in light of new information, to re-certify their vote totals. Some of the lawyers advising Trump thought they had found a mechanism to make that possible. It was in the Electoral Count Act of 1887, an ambiguous law that appeared to allow the vice president to exercise some authority in the Electoral College process. If they weren’t right, they also weren’t entirely wrong, because Congress has since passed the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022, rewriting the 1887 law to state that the VP’s role is purely “ministerial.”

This latest bogus indictment of Trump is the third of what likely will be four. He was first indicted by the Manhattan D.A. on 34 usually misdemeanor counts related to business record-keeping, bumped up to felonies because they were said to be committed in connection with a larger crime that has yet to be identified.

The second indictment, 37 felony counts of storing presidential records, is equally sketchy. It ignores a president’s legal right under the Presidential Records Act to determine, in his sole discretion, what is a personal record and what is a presidential record, and to take personal records with him when he leaves the White House. There’s nothing criminal about it.

A fourth indictment, expected soon in Georgia, reportedly pertains to a slate of “fake” electors. Once again, this is the Electoral College process, not a criminal conspiracy. In 1960, Hawaii had two slates of electors when the Kennedy-Nixon election was close and disputed.

There is a thrashing desperation in these “Get Trump” efforts that is becoming more obvious with each new court date. Just like the discredited Russia-collusion accusations, they are full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley