Trump pressures Georgia's Raffensperger to overturn his defeat in extraordinary call - The Washington PostThe clearest evidence yet that the only electoral fraud being attempted in the USA is being orchestrated by President-reject Donald J. Trump is revealed in a leaked recording of an hour-long telephone call in which Trump alternately begged then threatened Georgia's secretary of state and fellow Republican, Brad Raffensperger to falsify the November election result for the state by plucking imaginary votes from thin air and awarding them to Trump.
This attempt to interfere in an election and falsify the result is a clear violation of Georgia state law and carries a three-year prison sentence on conviction. It marks a low point in Desperate Don's campaign to overturn the November election, which he lost both in the popular vote (for a record second time) and in the Electoral College, in which he lost to Biden by the same margin that he described as a 'landslide' wehen he beat Clinton by it in 2016.
Behaving like a Mafia gang boss (I hope I haven't upset a Mafia gang boss by comparing him to Trump!), Trump tried flattery and begging first but quickly resorted to the sort of bullying tactics that characterised his business dealings, warning Raffensperger with 'consequences' if he refused his request, in a clear threat to abuse his presidential powers to order a spurious criminal investigation intended to damage Raffensperger and his legal team.
Although this is the clearest and irrefutable attempt to interfere with the free and fair electoral process in the USA by the Trumpanzee Crime Syndicate, it is merely the latest. Earlier attempts include:
- Inviting Mitchigan state officials to the White House to pressurise them into falsifying the result in his favour.
- Pressurising Georgia's Republican governor, Brian Kemp, to illegally replace the state's electors in the Electoral college with 'faithless electors' who would vote for him.
- Tried to pressurise the Republican speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives to help him reverse the declared result.
In effect, Trump appears to have believed his own lies, just like a spoilt-brat toddler who convinces himself that the lie he just told his mummy when she caught him with a stolen cookie - a big boy gave it to him and ran away! - was really true and will kick and scream and throw a tantrum until she says she believes him and lets him keep the cookie he stole.
Trump has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar all too often and has now been banned from the kitchen - but still insists he was set up by a 'big boy' who ran away.
In what sounded like the paranoid delusions of a narcissist unable or unwilling to accept defeat, but which hopefully he was correct about, Trump warned Raffensperger about the dire political consequences in addition to the criminal consequences with:
You have a big election coming up, and because of what you’ve done to the president — you know, the people of Georgia know that this was a scam. Because of what you’ve done to the president, a lot of people aren’t going out to vote, and a lot of Republicans are going to vote negative because they hate what you did to the president. Okay? They hate it. And they’re going to vote. And you would be respected, really respected, if this can be straightened out before the election.
The reports of very heavy early voting in traditionally Democrat-leaning districts in what is normally a Republican state is a hopeful sign that Trump's paranoia might have some basis in fact. Iff true, it will deprive the Repubicans of the one-vote majority they currently have in the Senate, giving Biden a much easier ride at least untill the mid-terms.
The threat to use the Justice Department to intimidate a state official to persuade him to falsify an election result is a clear abuse of power and an offence under both federal and state law and, as such, is an impeachable offence on an even bigger scale that the attempt to abuse his powers to induce the Ukrainian president to help him politically by lunching a spurious investigation into the business activities of Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, which led to his impeachment last year.
As it was an offence under Georgian state law, President-reject Trump cannot be pardoned by any incoming president nor, as he has even mooted, by himself, abusing presidential prerogative for his own ends again.
There now appears to be no barriers to Trump facing a criminal trial after he loses his presidential immunity after 20th January when Joe Biden will be inaugurated as the 46th President of the USA, heralding in a return to normality after the four-year term of a fraud who was clearly unfitted for public office by virtue of his criminal incompetence and his narcissistic personality disorder. President-reject Trump is due to replace the notoriously crooked Richard M. Nixon as the archetypal Republican crooked president. Nixon's crimes pall into insignificance compared to Trump's term when he turned the White House into the HQ of what amounted to a crime syndicate, hence his desperate scramble to pardon his family and associates of all crimes, even unspecified ones, before he loses the power to.
Hopefully, a lengthy spell in a federal penitentiary will break the hold he has over the Trumpanzee cult he managed to establish.
And then, as though these attempts to abuse his powers to get state officials to rig the November election results in his favour were not enough, there is now evidence that Trump has either attempted to organise or is planning to, a military intervention to overturn the election result. That evidence being that all ten living former US Defence Secretaries have apparently gotten wind of an approach to the military and have seen fit to write an opinion-piece in the Washington Post warning of the dangers of such a move. Opinion | 10 former defense secretaries: Involving military in election disputes would be dangerous, unlawful - The Washington Post
Trump is actually contemplating a military coup to have himself installed in power despite the expressed wishes of the American electorate by a 7 million + vote majority to boot him from office and have Joe Biden as their president. A military coup, worthy of a tin-pot dictator in a Latin American banana republic with a crime boss as El Presidente!
As former secretaries of defense, we hold a common view of the solemn obligations of the U.S. armed forces and the Defense Department. Each of us swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. We did not swear it to an individual or a party.
American elections and the peaceful transfers of power that result are hallmarks of our democracy. With one singular and tragic exception that cost the lives of more Americans than all of our other wars combined, the United States has had an unbroken record of such transitions since 1789, including in times of partisan strife, war, epidemics and economic depression. This year should be no exception.
Our elections have occurred. Recounts and audits have been conducted. Appropriate challenges have been addressed by the courts. Governors have certified the results. And the electoral college has voted. The time for questioning the results has passed; the time for the formal counting of the electoral college votes, as prescribed in the Constitution and statute, has arrived.
As senior Defense Department leaders have noted, “there’s no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election.” Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory. Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.
Transitions, which all of us have experienced, are a crucial part of the successful transfer of power. They often occur at times of international uncertainty about U.S. national security policy and posture. They can be a moment when the nation is vulnerable to actions by adversaries seeking to take advantage of the situation.
Given these factors, particularly at a time when U.S. forces are engaged in active operations around the world, it is all the more imperative that the transition at the Defense Department be carried out fully, cooperatively and transparently. Acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller and his subordinates — political appointees, officers and civil servants — are each bound by oath, law and precedent to facilitate the entry into office of the incoming administration, and to do so wholeheartedly. They must also refrain from any political actions that undermine the results of the election or hinder the success of the new team.
We call upon them, in the strongest terms, to do as so many generations of Americans have done before them. This final action is in keeping with the highest traditions and professionalism of the U.S. armed forces, and the history of democratic transition in our great country.
Ashton Carter
Dick Cheney
William Cohen
Mark Esper
Robert Gates
Chuck Hagel
James Mattis
Leon Panetta
William Perry
Donald Rumsfeld
(Former Defence Secreataries of the USA.)
This dangerously deluded narcissist is a clear and present danger to both the USA and the rest of the world. If he is capable of even thinking this sort of thing to cling to the power to which he feels entitles, is there anything he is not capable of doing?
The first thing President Joe Biden needs to do is to lance this suppurating boil by setting up an independent investigation into all aspects of the Trump presidency, including the persistent rumours of Russian interference in his favour in 2016, his business dealings while in office and his almost wilful mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic which has cost over 300,000 American lives so far, to exposed the depth of the corruption he brought to the post and the extent of his abuse of powers, with powers to subpoena witnesses, seize documents and bring prosecutions where necessary. Any pardons Trump has granted to the members of his crime syndicate should be removed, so the whole truth can be exposed.
Meawhile the Republican Party should purge itself of anyone who was prepared to sell out their electorate by supporting Trump in return for his patronage at the expense of American democracy. Only then can American democracy show itself to be robust enough to withstand a naked grab for unlected power by the extreme right with the support of the grovelling and unprincipled evangelical wing of American Christianity and it's mega-rich televangelists hoping to errect a Taliban-style theocracy over the corpse of American democracy to reverse the flood of people leaving the established churches, sickened by the naked greed, dishonesty and hypocrisy which have come to characterise it.
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