Donald Trump and maga Republicans support the evil retribution campaign against anyone Trump does not like: That's a lot of people!

Trump’s Vendetta Campaign Targets Mr. John Bolton

Echo editorial opinion published in The Wall Street Journal

This FBI raid makes clearer that second-term success for the President includes retribution.

Trump promised voters during his campaign for a second term that he had bigger things on his mind than retribution against opponents. But it is increasingly clear that vengeance is a large part, maybe the largest part, of how he will define success in his second term.

Trump's revenge campaign took an ominous turn Friday as FBI agents raided the home and office of Trump’s first-term national security adviser John Bolton. They brought two broad warrants to search the “premises.” Agents showed up unannounced at his Bethesda, Md., home at 7 a.m. They confiscated his wife Gretchen’s phone because it was visible and not on her person. Mr. Bolton had already left for his office, which is where FBI agents greeted him.

Trump Gets His Revenge on John Bolton. Who’s Next?

An echo editorial published in The New York Times 

Less than 12 hours after President Trump’s inauguration in January, he revoked the security detail protecting John Bolton, his former national security adviser turned critic, despite credible threats from Iran. Since then, Trump has repeatedly ridiculed Mr. Bolton on social media, including by calling him one of the “stupid people” making it harder to end the Ukraine war. The president has also continued his yearslong accusations that Mr. Bolton leaked classified information, without offering any evidence.

None of Trump’s pressure tactics stopped Mr. Bolton from pointing out the president’s many foreign policy failures. On Thursday evening, Mr. Bolton was back on CNN, saying that President Vladimir Putin of Russia had managed to “roll” Trump at their recent (failed❗) Alaska summit, and criticizing the administration for being unable to explain the outcome of the summit or the future of peace talks.

On Friday morning, Augut 22, 2025, the intimidation ratcheted up several notches. 

At dawn, the F.B.I. conducted a search of Mr. Bolton’s house in Bethesda, Md., and his office in Washington. Agents carried out boxes of papers and put them into vehicles with flashing blue lights in front of the amassed cameras. The Times reported that officials were investigating whether Mr. Bolton had improperly leaked national security information to the news media and other parties to damage the Trump administration. Mr. Bolton, notably, has not held government office in six years.

It is too early to know what the F.B.I. will claim to find in all of those boxes but not too early to surmise that the search for incriminating documents was not the real goal of Friday’s search. 

Even if it turns up documents that should not be there, the administration has damaged any presumption of good faith by flinging weightless accusations of criminality at those who challenge it. That approach was evident in the snide social media posts that accompanied the search. “NO ONE is above the law,” wrote Kash Patel, the bureau’s director. “@FBI agents on mission.” Mr. Patel’s deputy Dan Bongino jumped to an accusation of guilt with his response: “Public corruption will not be tolerated.” And Attorney General Pam (aka "Nurse Ratchet "of DOJ) Bondi declared: “America’s safety isn’t negotiable. Justice will be pursued. Always.”

The search is a new chapter in Trump’s campaign of retribution against his critics. The White House and its loyalists in the Justice Department and the F.B.I. are sending a clear message: Keep quiet, or we will use the extraordinary power of federal law enforcement to threaten your job or your liberty and put you under a lasting cloud of suspicion. And they are using the fearsome punitive authority of the government to conduct this campaign.

Trump has accused former President Barack Obama of “treason,” claiming his predecessor was behind the effort to reveal how Russia helped Trump’s 2016, campaign. “He’s guilty,” Trump said of Mr. Obama in July, acting as both judge and jury. 

Almost immediately the Justice Department created a task force to investigate the allegation. Jack Smith, the former special counsel who brought two federal indictments against Trump, is now under a federal investigation after Senator Tom Cotton, (aka "Cotton Balls Cotton") Republican of Arkansas, accused him of violating the Hatch Act.

The White House is also using accusations of mortgage fraud against three people for whom Mr. Trump holds special grievances. The F.B.I. has begun a criminal investigation into whether Letitia James, the attorney general of New York and a Democrat, lied on mortgage documents. Ms. James, who denied the charge, won a fraud judgment against Trump in a state court last year. (This week a New York appellate court tossed out the half-billion-dollar fine against him as excessive but upheld the judgment.) The Justice Department has even issued a subpoena to Ms. James for records related to her lawsuit against Mr. Trump, an extraordinary intrusion into a state legal matter that directly affects Ms. Bondi’s boss.

The second target is Senator Adam Schiff, a California Democrat and an outspoken adversary of Mr. Trump, whom the president has accused of similar deception on a mortgage application; a federal investigation is underway. The third is Lisa Cook, a member of the board of the Federal Reserve (appointed by President Joe Biden), whom Trump threatened to fire on Friday, claiming the grounds of mortgage deception*. The allegations initially came from Bill Pulte, Trump’s appointee as the Federal Housing Finance Agency director, who has not explained how Ms. Cook’s federal mortgage application came to his attention. The move fits with Trump’s intention to take control of the central bank, despite its independence from the executive.

It is possible none of these investigations will result in a criminal charge. Still, they can do great harm to their targets. The cost of mounting a defense can be ruinous, and in some cases the reputational damage can be impossible to fix.

Whatever the outcome, they instill fear in anyone who might consider challenging the president, and they erode trust in the justice system.

Trump seems convinced that he is doing nothing to his rivals that was not done to him in earlier prosecutions and lawsuits. 

That is untrue (IOW, another lie❗🤥). There is little comparison between the substantial evidence amassed in his cases — in particular, that he tried to break the nation’s election laws in 2020, and refused to return classified White House documents — and the frequent lack of evidence lobbed at his adversaries.

We do not pretend to know how any of these cases will turn out. 

Nevertheless, it is clear that Trump and his appointees are perverting the justice system to serve their political interests and intimidate their critics. Given this pattern, Mr. John Bolton and the rest of Trump’s targets deserve every benefit of the doubt. Despite the justice system’s many imperfections, Americans long had reason to trust that federal officials would not target people for investigations without evidence. Under the Trump administration, that assumption is disappearing. The president has given all Americans reason to believe that justice is now applied selectively and unfairly.

*Donald Trump has a history of being accused of mortgage fraud❗

New York v. Trump is a civil investigation and lawsuit by the office of the New York Attorney General alleging that individuals and business entities within the Trump Organization engaged in financial fraud by presenting vastly disparate property values to potential lenders and tax officials, in violation of New York Executive Law § 63(12). The defendants were Donald Trump, five other individuals including three of his children, and ten business entities including some that owned property in New York, Florida, and Chicago.

Fast forward Donald Trump's march toward justice

Echo opinion published in The Washington Post by the Editorial Board:

Supreme Court

The essential moment in Jack Smith’s 2020, election obstruction case against Donald Trump might have arrived — and, oddly, the substance of the charges has nothing to do with it. The special counsel this week filed a motion asking the Supreme Court to speedily review the former president’s claims that he is immune from prosecution, rather than allow an appeals court to do so first. The strategy is gutsy, but it might be necessary to get the case to trial before the general election — and that is a wholly legitimate goal for Trump’s prosecutor.

Mr. Smith has asked the justices to grant him what’s known as certiorari before judgment. This is an extraordinary request, but the special counsel is hardly summoning a legal theory out of thin air. The Supreme Court has embraced the procedure in many cases involving national crises, including in United States v. Nixon, when President Richard M. Nixon refused to turn over his infamous audiotapes. That’s because, as a long line of law recognizes, the public is as entitled to the fair administration of justice as anyone standing trial. 

Part of what makes this case extraordinary is Mr. Trump’s unique potential to force a halt to the prosecution. Even when defendants use delay as a courtroom tactic, they typically still have to face prosecutors at some point.

By ignoring that timing in a case with the peaceful transition of power at its heart, the courts would allow themselves to be manipulated by a politician using his status as a candidate to avoid accountability. The gambit to prevent District Court Judge Tanya S. Chutkan from meeting a March 4, trial date, by appealing her rejection of Mr. Trump’s immunity defense, is only the latest delay tactic by the Trump legal team. The former president’s allies and his lawyers appear to believe his surest route to escaping accountability is to win reelection before a jury manages to convict him, then instructing the Justice Department to drop its cases. 

The Supreme Court would show that the justice system won’t be tricked if, instead, the justices ensured the case is tried on the merits.

The merits, as it turns out, aren’t too difficult to assess. A D.C. Circuit panel has already decided that a president’s civil immunity for actions taken while in office is limited when those actions are taken not in the president’s role as president, but in his role as a reelection seeker — as when Mr. Trump gave his January 6, 2021, speech urging supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol. The argument that a president is free from criminal liability during his tenure, meanwhile, has next to nothing to support it in doctrine or in history. There’s a reason, after all, that Nixon required a pardon from Gerald Ford, and that Bill Clinton gave up his law license as part of a deal to avoid prosecution following his perjury scandal.

This makes sense: A president’s duties will never require him to break the law, much less to do so intentionally. What’s more, much of the conduct described in the indictment, such as pressuring electors to defect or urging Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” cannot be construed to be inside the scope of the executive’s official duties.

Trump also argues that charging him based on the same violations for which he was impeached by the House and acquitted by the Senate would constitute double jeopardy. 

Yet the Constitution’s Impeachment Judgments clause says that if a president is convicted by the Senate, he can still be tried in a court of law. Reading this backward to suggest that if a president isn’t convicted by the Senate, he can’t be tried in a court of law defies common sense. The Framers clearly designed impeachment to serve a distinct purpose from prosecution.

The Supreme Court should grant the special counsel the speedy hearing he asked for, because of the public interest in a decision that is quick, carefully considered and, crucially, final. If it does not the justices should at least instruct lower courts to move briskly, after which they should promptly choose once and for all whether to review the case. This procedural matter will swallow up the substance of the case unless the courts decide not to let it.

Trump has not unified the Republican party because he is under criminal indictments and convicted sexual abuser

What if, Knowing What They Know Now, Republicans Don’t Vote for Donald Trump?

Editorial echo opinion published in The New York Times:

After three other criminal indictments were filed against him, Donald Trump was accused on Monday in Georgia of racketeering. 

In a new indictment, Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., charged him with leading what was effectively a criminal gang to overturn the 2020, presidential election in that state.

In fact, the grand jury indictment says Trump and 18 others violated the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO law, established by the federal government and more than 30 states and used to crack down on Mafia protection rackets, biker gangs and insider trading schemes. The Georgia indictment alleges that Trump often behaved like a mob boss, pressuring the Georgia secretary of state to decertify the Georgia election and holding a White House meeting to discuss seizing voting equipment.

Trump and a group of associates that included his then chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and one of his lawyers at the time, the former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, were also accused of a series of crimes that go beyond even the sweeping federal indictment filed this month by the special counsel Jack Smith. The former guy president, for example, was charged with conspiracy to commit first-degree forgery, for arranging to have a false set of Georgia electors sent to Washington to replace the legitimate ones for Joe Biden. 

Moreover, that same act also resulted in a charge against Mr. Trump of conspiracy to impersonate a public officer and a series of charges relating to filing false statements and trying to get state officials to violate their oath of office.

Taken together, these four indictments — which include more than 90 federal and state criminal charges implicating his official conduct during his term and acts afterward, as well as in his personal and business life — offer a road map of the trauma and drama Trump has put this nation through. They raise questions about his fitness for office that go beyond ideology or temperament, focusing instead on his disdain for American democracy.

And yet these questions will ultimately be resolved not by the courts but by the electorate. Republican primary voters, in particular, are being presented with an opportunity to pause and consider the costs of his leadership thus far, to the health of the nation and of their party, and the further damage he could do if rewarded with another four years in power.

Put aside, for the moment, everything that has happened in the eight years since Trump first announced his candidacy for president. Consider only what is now on reams of legal paper before the American people: evidence of extraordinarily serious crimes, so overwhelming that many other defendants would have already negotiated a plea bargain rather than go to trial. This is what he faces as he asks, once again, for the votes of millions of Americans.

“I’m being indicted for you,” the former president has been telling his supporters. “They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you.” But time and again, Trump has put his ego and ambition over the interests of the public and of his own supporters. He has aggressively worked to undermine public faith in the democratic process and to warp the foundations of the electoral system. He repeatedly betrayed his constitutional duty to faithfully execute the nation’s laws. His supporters may be just as angered and disappointed by his loss as he is. But his actions, as detailed in these indictments, show that he is concerned with no one’s interests but his own. Among the accusations against him:

He took dozens of highly classified documents, some involving nuclear secrets and attack plans, out of the White House and stored them at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence, where guests of all kinds visit each year. Then, despite being asked multiple times, he refused to return many of these documents, instead working with his aides and confidants to move and hide the boxes containing them and to destroy video surveillance records of those acts, even after a subpoena from the Justice Department.

He attempted to overturn the 2020, election by using what he knew to be false claims of voter fraud to pressure numerous state and federal officials, including his own vice president and top officials of the Justice Department, to reverse voting results and declare him the winner.

He sought to disenfranchise millions of American voters by trying to nullify their legally cast ballots in order to keep himself in office. In doing so, he colluded with dozens of campaign staff members and other associates to pressure state officials to throw out certified vote counts and to organize slates of fake electors to cast ballots for him.

In one example of the personal damage he caused, Trump led a scheme to harass and intimidate a Fulton County election worker, Ruby Freeman, falsely accusing her of committing election crimes. The Georgia indictment — accusing him of the crime of false statements and writings in official matters — says he falsely called her a “professional vote scammer” who stuffed a ballot box with fraudulent votes for Mr. Biden.

After having extramarital sex with an adult film actress, he falsified business records to hide $130,000 in hush-money payments to her before the 2016 election.

That list does not include the verdict, by a New York State court in May, that Mr. Trump was civilly liable for sexual assault against E. Jean Carroll. Nor does it include the ongoing asset and tax fraud prosecution of the Trump Organization by the New York attorney general, Letitia James.

Time and again, Mr. Trump has demanded that Republicans choose him over the party, and he has exposed and exploited some genuine rifts in the G.O.P., refashioning the party to suit his own agenda. The party will have to deal with those fault lines and may have to reconfigure itself and its platform. But if Republicans surrender to his demands, they may find themselves led by a candidate whose second term in office would be even more damaging to America and to the party than his first.

A president facing multiple criminal trials, some prosecuted by his own Justice Department, could not hope to be effective in enforcing the nation’s laws — one of the primary duties of a chief executive. (If re-elected, Trump could order the federal prosecutions to be dropped, though that would hardly enhance his credibility.) A man accused of compromising national security would have little credibility in his negotiations with foreign allies or adversaries. No document could be assumed to remain secret, no communication secure. The nation’s image as a beacon of democracy, already badly tarnished by the January 6th attack, may not survive the election of someone formally accused of systematically dismantling his own country’s democratic process through deceit.

The charges in the Georgia case are part of the larger plot described in the federal indictment of Mr. Trump this month. 

But, Ms. Willis used tools that weren’t available to Mr. Smith. Georgia’s RICO statute allows for many more predicate crimes than the federal version does, including false statements, which she used to bring the charge against several of the defendants in the fake-elector part of the scheme.

Altogether, the Fulton grand jury cited 161 separate acts in the larger conspiracy, from small statements like false tweets to major violations like trying to get the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to decertify the state’s election by “unlawfully altering” the official vote count, which was in Mr. Biden’s favor. Though some of the individual acts might not be crimes themselves, they added up to what Ms. Willis called a scheme by “a criminal organization whose members and associates engaged in various related criminal activities,” all for the benefit of the former president of the United States.

Those legal tools are part of a broad American justice ecosystem that is, at its core, a mechanism for seeking the truth. It is not designed to care about politics or partisanship; it is supposed to establish facts. To do so, it tests every claim rigorously, with a set of processes and rules that ensure both sides can be heard on every issue, and then it puts the final decision to convict in the hands of a jury of the defendant’s peers, who will make the weighty decision of guilt or innocence.

And that is what makes this moment different from all the chaos of the past eight years.  Trump is now a criminal defendant four times over. While he is innocent until proven guilty, he will have to answer for his actions.

But, almost certainly before then, he will have to answer to Republican voters. His grip on the party has proved enduring, but not universal; while he is far ahead of the other candidates, a recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed that he is the choice of only 54 percent of likely primary voters. And about half of Republican voters told pollsters for Reuters/Ipsos that they would not vote for him if he was convicted of a felony.

The indictments — two brought by elected prosecutors who are Democrats, all of them arriving before the start of Republican presidential primaries — have been read by many as political, and Republicans have said without evidence they are all organized for the benefit of President Biden. 

Trump has amplified that message and used it to drive fund-raising for his campaign. Although the outcome of these indictments may have a political impact, that alone does not make them political. To assume that any prosecution of a political figure is political would, in effect, “immunize all high-ranking powerful political people from ever being held accountable for the wrongful things they do,” said Kristy Parker, a lawyer with the advocacy group Protect Democracy. “And if you do that, you subvert the idea that this is a rule-of-law society where everybody is subject to equal justice.”

Trump has repeatedly offered Republicans a false choice: Stick by me, or the enemy wins. But a healthy political party does not belong to or depend on one man, particularly one who has repeatedly put himself over his party and his country. A healthy democracy needs at least two functioning parties to challenge each other’s honesty and direction. Republican voters are key to restoring that health and balance.

For the average person who is confused by the 91 Trump indictments - think one word= "Fascism"

An echo opinion by Jennifer Rubin, published in The Washington Post:

"Someone’s going to get hurt. Someone’s going to get shot. Someone’s going to get killed. And it’s not right.” 

Special Counsel Jack Smith (Shaye Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman)....who brought down the hammer and gave Trump his second indictment; now another is coming in Fulton County Georgia, when prosecutor Fani Willis is made grand jury charges public.

But the purported criminal enterprise did not stop, either in Georgia or in D.C.

Special counsel Jack Smith, for practical and legal reasons, chose not to indict defeated former president Donald Trump on charges of instigating the violence on Jan. 6, 2021. Smith wants a solid, slimmed-down case without First Amendment complications, which could arise in focusing on Trump’s “Stop the Steal” speech on the Ellipse.

Instead, Smith’s indictment portrays Trump as opportunistically taking advantage of the angry mob. That left many democracy defenders unsettled. Hasn’t violence always been part of Trump’s playbook, and wasn’t Trump egging on the violent mob?

Fortunately, Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani Willis puts the question of Trump’s responsibility for mob violence front and center.

Right up front, the indictment handed down Monday by a grand jury in Atlanta alleges:

Members of the enterprise, including several of the Defendants, falsely accused Fulton County election worker Ruby Freeman of committing election crimes in Fulton County, Georgia. These false accusations were repeated to Georgia legislators and other Georgia officials in an effort to persuade them to unlawfully change the outcome of the November 3, 2020, presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. In furtherance of this scheme, members of the enterprise traveled from out of state to harass Freeman, intimidate her, and solicit her to falsely confess to election crimes that she did not commit.

In fact, the indictment describes defendants traveling to election worker Ruby Freeman’s home to mislead and intimidate her. 

Willis alleged Trump defamed Freeman to Georgia officials (claiming she was a “a professional vote scammer and a known political operative” and saying that “Ruby Freeman, her daughter, and others were responsible for fraudulently awarding at least 18,000 ballots to Joseph R. Biden at State Farm Arena in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia.”) Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that Freeman had stuffed ballot boxes. 

In a one-hour phone call with Georgia election officials, former guy Trump insisted he won the state and threatened vague legal consequences.

Trump tweeted references to a conspiracy about Freeman to his followers. We know those people included cult Trumpzis who were menacing election workers, making threats and endangering the lives of Freeman and others.

Former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani is also accused of bantering about lies concerning Freeman (who he falsely stated had been “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine”). These lies reverberated through social media, putting a target on Freeman’s back and helping escalate threats against Georgia officials.

The indictment works to refocus our attention on the mob Trump and Giuliani allegedly tried to incite, to the threats the MAGA horde lobbed toward election officials and others, and to the gripping testimony from Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss, at the House Jan. 6 hearings. From everything we’ve seen, these Georgians’ lives were made a living hell.
Without the Georgia case and without Trump identified as the head of the alleged criminal enterprise, there would be no justice for those victims, no accounting for the use of mob violence to corrupt the democratic process.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present” and an expert on fascism, told Insider that Trump resorted to inciting the crowd to violence when his other schemes failed “because he truly believes that violence is a way you can change history.” She added, “The thing about autocrats today is that they’re all corrupt, but they’re also violent. They use all of these tools at the same time. So, we can’t isolate one and say that Jan. 6 was just about this or just about that. It was everything. It was a process of months and it culminated in violence.”

The element of thuggishness reflective of authoritarians throughout time and around the globe should not be whitewashed in Trump’s prosecution. It’s easy to make Trump’s alleged attempted coup, run mostly by lawyers and focused on memos distorting and misrepresenting constitutional principles, seem sophisticated, legalistic and without human victims.

But, at bottom, the alleged plot rested on the threat of violence both in D.C. and in Georgia.

And let’s not forget this is all part of Trump’s playbook.

As Ben-Ghiat recalled in a recent interview, “Since 2015, he [has] used his rallies … as radicalization sites. And over and over, he told his supporters at these rallies that violence was a good way to solve conflict.” She reminded us, “How many times did he say, ‘Oh, you know, in the good old days, we used to be able to punch people, and nothing happened’? So, that discourse of violence, which encouraged January 6, is part of this.”

In December 2020, Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling held an emotional news conference, at which he said: “Mr. President, it looks like you likely lost the state of Georgia. We’re investigating. … What you don’t have the ability to do — and you need to step up and say this — is stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence.” He added, “Someone’s going to get hurt. Someone’s going to get shot. Someone’s going to get killed. And it’s not right.” 

But, the purported criminal enterprise did not stop, either in Georgia or in D.C.

In some legal venue, Trump and his cohorts need to be held accountable for infusing our politics with violence and the threat of violence, for the damage done to Freeman, for the police officers wounded on Capitol Hill, and for the trauma inflicted by the mob they stand accused of orchestrating. That might be a courtroom in Fulton County, Georgia.

Indeed, that would be a service to our democracy and a historical lesson cementing Trump’s legacy as a fascist strongman.

What is it Republicans do not "get"? Donald Trump indicted in Manhattan, Washington DC, Florida and Georgia

Echo editorial opinion published in The Boston Globe:

EDITORIAL- Georgia indictment puts Trump at the top of an organized crime ring.

The district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, brought racketeering charges against the former president and 18 codefendants, showing the alleged attempt to overturn the 2020, election was not mere rhetoric but the work of an organized criminal enterprise.

Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, has been on Donald Trump’s case since he left office. One month after the former president was caught on tape, in January 2021, pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes” — conveniently just enough to overcome Joe Biden’s victory there — she started probing Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the election results in her state. And on Monday, after investigating him and his inner circle for more than two years, Willis obtained an indictment of Trump and 18 codefendants on racketeering charges, marking the fourth time the 45th president of the United States has been criminally charged since leaving office.

While the move to indict a former president has gone from unprecedented to an all-too-familiar fixture in the news over the past five months, the Georgia indictment stands out for its breadth. Unlike federal special counsel Jack Smith’s last indictment of Trump, which focused on a narrow set of crimes Trump allegedly committed in his effort to overthrow the government, Willis delivered sweeping charges that outline the markings of an organized criminal enterprise. And by doing so, the indictment helps crystalize how Trump and his inner circle operated in brazenly illegal conduct, not just through deception and lies but through intimidation tactics and pressure campaigns against lawmakers and election workers, going so far as to breach voting machines.

Indeed, by bringing charges under the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act — or RICO, which was designed to target gangs and other organized crime groups — Willis was able to bundle together a set of criminal charges that connect all the dots and underscore a broader plot. 

Special Counsel Jack Smith's indictment of Trump is devastating: A reckless criminal has finally met his match.

Rather than pursuing each involved individual for their own alleged misconduct in separate cases, this will put the whole scheme and its proponents on trial, telling the story of how a group of individuals, at the behest of the former president, conspired to achieve a common illegal goal — overturning the lawful presidential election results.

The case zooms out, in other words, from Trump’s individual actions to show that not only is he responsible for the specific instances of his own misconduct but also for crimes that others potentially committed in concert with, and because of, him and his attempt to hold onto power. His codefendants include high-profile figures like his former lawyer Rudolph Giuliani and his former chief of staff Mark Meadows — an important step that will hopefully serve to deter a future president’s cronies from playing along with such a crooked plot, knowing that they could face prison time for doing so.

As the indictment alleges, the 19 codefendants, as well as an assortment of unindicted coconspirators, “constituted a criminal organization whose members and associates engaged in various related criminal activities including, but not limited to, false statements and writings, impersonating a public officer, forgery, filing false documents, influencing witnesses, computer theft, computer trespass, computer invasion of privacy, conspiracy to defraud the state, acts involving theft, and perjury.”

Those charges included a campaign to smear and harass an election worker, Ruby Freeman, by baselessly accusing her of election fraud. Some of the codefendants are charged with breaching voting machines and stealing data, including personal voter information — which would be breathtakingly hypocritical, given the former president’s purported concern for election integrity. The indictment goes on to say that the individuals listed “functioned as a unit for a common purpose of achieving the objectives of the enterprise.”

What Willis does in these criminal charges is show the American public what has been clear about Trump since he demanded personal loyalty from his political appointees and retaliated against anyone who dared to cross him: that he operates like a mob boss. And what has been clear since the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021: Trump’s effort to overturn the election he lost was not simply a matter of him lying and telling his supporters that he had won but that he conspired with almost anyone willing to help him to find some way — any way — to stay in power, Constitution be damned.

For an elected Democratic prosecutor to bring charges against a former Republican president unavoidably looks partisan. But that appearance is deceiving. The crimes Trump is accused of reach a level of seriousness that merit both the state and federal justice systems holding him accountable. And with both the Georgia case and the Department of Justice’s criminal charges related to his alleged effort to overturn the election, the American justice system — at both the state and federal levels — is so far showing that it’s working as it should to protect elections from subversion.

Read the indictment and listen to the evidence about how Trump engaged in election interference

Alberto Gonzales was the 80th attorney general of the United States and counsel to President George W. Bush. He is now the dean and Doyle Rogers distinguished professor of law at Belmont University College of Law and serves on the advisory board for the Vanderbilt Project on Unity & American Democracy.

An echo opinion published in The Washington Post written by former AG Alberto Gonzales.

Alberto Gonzales was the first Hispanic Attorney General 

Last week, as I watched a former president of the United States, for the first time in history, be arraigned in federal court for attempting to obstruct official proceedings and overturn the results of the 2020, presidential election, I found myself less troubled by the actions of former president Donald Trump than by the response of a significant swath of the American people to Trump’s deepening legal woes.

To be clear, August. 3 was a sobering and singular day for our country. Trump’s obsession with remaining in power at the expense of the constitutional right of American voters to choose our president, which culminated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, has been devastating. But the worst may still be ahead if we do not return to our roots as a nation of laws. A recent Vanderbilt Unity Poll shows that 38 percent of Republicans believe they support the Constitution while Democrats do not. Likewise, 33 percent of Democrats believe that they support the Constitution but Republicans do not. 

These figures send a chill down my spine, suggesting that what is really on trial is the rule of law itself.

I am among a number of jurists with experience at the highest levels of our government who grow more concerned as support for Trump mounts in direct proportion to the number of indictments against him. 😖 

Although Trump has a right to defend himself, his language and actions since 2016, have fueled a growing sense among many Americans that our justice system is rigged, and biased against him and his supporters.

Sadly, this has led on the right to a growing distrust of and rage against the Justice Department. I recently heard from friends and former colleagues whom I trust and admire, people of common sense and strong values, who say that our justice system appears to be stacked against Trump and Republicans in general, that it favors liberals and Democrats, and that it serves the interests of the Democratic Party and not the Constitution. For example, they cite the department’s 2018, decision not to charge Hillary Clinton criminally for keeping classified documents on a private email server while she was secretary of state during the Obama administration.

I can understand the skepticism, but based on the known facts in each case, I do not share it.

Our system of government and way of life are based on the rule of law, which is the principle that every defendant in this country is judged according to proven evidence, a known and accepted set of rules, equally enforced and independently adjudicated by a neutral judge or jury. I have often reminded the public that facts drive the outcome in every prosecution. A prosecutor’s assessment of the evidence affects decisions on whether to charge on a set of known facts, and government officials under investigation, such as Clinton, often cooperate with prosecutors to address potential wrongdoing. By all accounts, Trump has refused to cooperate. Regardless, once prosecutors believe they may have grounds for an indictment, they cannot unilaterally indict any individual they choose. They must bring their evidence before a grand jury, which is made up of ordinary citizens, who weigh evidence and have the final say as to whether a defendant should be indicted.

Our justice system, reliant as it is on human effort and judgment, is not perfect. From time to time, we learn after the fact of a miscarriage of justice. But far more often than not, only the guilty are punished. We have a duty as Americans not to blindly trust our justice system, but we also shouldn’t blindly trust those who say it is unjust. Our government officials have a duty to act at all times with integrity, and when appropriate to inform and reassure the public that their decisions are consistent based on provable evidence and in accordance with the rule of law.

"Rather than assuming conspiracies....." 

Ugh!

Defendants do not have the same duty. They can, and sometimes do, say almost anything to prove their innocence — no matter how damaging to our democracy and the rule of law. Republicans who feel aggrieved by the number of indictments piling up against Trump and others affiliated with him should bear this in mind and carefully review the facts of the cases against him rather than assuming conspiracies. I urge them to at least be open to considering that the problem may rest with Trump rather than the prosecution of him for his alleged crimes.

Let’s set aside the fact that three independent grand juries of Americans — not just three prosecutors — have indicted one Republican politician, Trump, for a variety of crimes. All crimes are important to the victims. The crimes alleged in the most recent indictment appear to be the most serious, because if they are true, then Trump engaged in crimes against democracy — crimes against millions of voters in this country. 

Scores of Americans who participated in the January 6th riots have been held accountable. It stands to reason that the person who urged them to go to the Capitol and who stood the most to gain from interfering with the electoral count should also be held accountable.

Remember that we are not seeing Republicans arrested for wearing their Make America Great Again hats or their Don’t Tread on Me bumper stickers, both are fine examples of free speech. 

But, the key difference is this: Speech that leads to crime has never been protected from prosecution. Wearing a Second Amendment shirt is not a crime, but conspiring to commit murder is a crime, separate from the murder itself. Lying to masses of Americans that their right to vote was taken away and encouraging them to take it back by any means — as Trump is accused of doing — can, based on evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, constitute a crime.

January 6th insurrectionists attack the US Capitol

To suggest that special counsel Jack Smith’s latest indictment on the January 6th, assault is just an attack on free speech, as some Republican partisans are claiming, is itself an attack on the rule of law. If a private citizen had organized the events on January 6th, there is little doubt that they would have been arrested and prosecuted. The Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol should not be held to a higher standard than the former president. If we decide that presidents should never be charged with crimes after they leave office for actions committed while in office, we are no longer a democracy.

Read more about Trump's involvement in the January 6th failed insurrection at this site here.

It may not be easy, but conversations around this case and the Justice Department demand civility and respect. The burden of proof is on the government, and the department should be given the chance to present its case, proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The defendant should then be given the opportunity to rebut the charges and present his defense if he so chooses.

As someone who once led the Justice Department and has great confidence in the thousands of men and women who work there, I feel an obligation to understand why there is such distrust in our justice system. Is it justified, or is it based on political rhetoric intended to stir political passions? Constructive and civil dialogue is essential in finding the answer.

While the stakes are high for Trump, the stakes are higher for our democracy. The reality is that, while this latest indictment is momentous, the impact on the American people’s perception of it will be more important moving forward. We all have a part in shaping that perception. It is important for politicians to avoid using the indictments announced on August 3rd,  as political fodder. The media has an obligation to fully inform the public and rigorously compare and contrast these indictments with past decisions by the Justice Department to decline to prosecute — as was the case relating to classified documents with both a Democratic secretary of state (Clinton) and a former Republican vice president (Mike Pence).

Pundits across the political spectrum have a duty to be honest with Americans and to demonstrate that Trump is not being singled out and treated unfairly unless there is clear evidence to believe otherwise. The American people should withhold their judgment, consider the facts as the case moves forward, and be wary of words designed to fan the flames of partisanship. The rule of law is the glue that holds our country together. If we are to survive as a democracy, we must continue to respect and protect it.

Special Counsel Jack Smith is leading a federal investigation into Donald Trump’s role in inciting the January 6th attack, and attempting to overturn the results of the 2020, election.

Legal indictments against the former guy's cult (a.k.a. the Trumpzis) are showing up in state courts like Michigan

An opinion editorial by Norman Eisen, published in The New York Times:

We’ve reached a turning point in the effort to ensure there are consequences for those who deliberately attempt to undermine our democracy: Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, charged 16 Republican leaders in her state on Tuesday for their role as fake electors working to overturn the results of the 2020 election. 

In fact, the charges, coming on the heels of news that the special counsel Jack Smith has informed Donald Trump that he’s a target of the Department of Justice’s investigation into the Capitol riot, mean we are witnessing a new and necessary phase in this quest for accountability, one in which the federal and state wheels of justice work to hold people accountable not only for the violence on Jan. 6, but also for what got us there: the alleged scheme to interfere with the transfer of power.

The charges in Michigan will surely meet criticism on all sides. Some will say the case is not broad or bold enough, that Mr. Trump and the other alleged national ringleaders should have been charged as well. Others will say Ms. Nessel cast too wide a net, pulling in low-level party functionaries who did not know better. We think those critiques are misconceived. Ms. Nessel got it just right, prosecuting crimes firmly within her jurisdiction, while opening the way for federal authorities to net even bigger fish.

Ms. Nessel brought the same eight counts against all 16 defendants. The offenses include conspiracy to commit forgery, since the defendants are accused of signing documents stating they were the qualified electors (they were not), and publishing forged documents by circulating these materials to federal and state authorities. On paper, the penalties for the offenses range from five to 14 years, but sentencing in this case would presumably be lower than that maximum.

Until now there have been no charges centered on the fake electors plot. For that reason alone, Michigan’s action brings a sense of needed accountability for those who fanned the rioters’ passions leading up to Jan. 6 by spinning a false narrative about a stolen election.

Michigan saw some of the most outrageous fake electoral certificates to emerge during the period leading up to the Capitol riot. 

Unlike the fake certificates in Pennsylvania and New Mexico, the Michigan documents did not include a disclaimer that they were to be used only in the case of litigation. What’s more, the documents contained more outright false statements than simply declaring that the signers were the lawful electors of the winning candidate.

For example, they state that the electors “convened and organized in the State Capitol,” when, according to the attorney general, they were hidden away in the basement of the state Republican headquarters. (It seems likely that the fake electors included this lie because Michigan law requires presidential electors to meet in the Capitol — a requirement and legal problem that a Trump campaign legal adviser, Kenneth Chesebro, had flagged in his confidential memorandum setting out the scheme.)

In proving these cases, establishing intent will be key. Here, there are several indicators that the defendants may have been aware of the illicit nature of their gathering. According to congressional testimony from the state Republican Party’s chairwoman at the time, Laura Cox, the group originally planned to meet inside the Capitol and hide overnight, so they could vote in the building the following day. Ms. Cox said she told a lawyer working with the Trump campaign and supposedly organizing the fake electors “in no uncertain terms that that was insane and inappropriate,” and “a very, very bad idea and potentially illegal.”

As she put it, Ms. Cox was “very uncomfortable” with facilitating a meeting of the fake elector group, and said so at the time in accord with her lawyers’ opinion. Ms. Cox even urged the group to draft a significantly more measured document simply “stating that if perhaps something were to happen in the courts, they were willing and able to serve as electors from Michigan for Donald Trump.” 

Nevertheless, her advice was not followed.

At the time the fake electors met to allegedly forge their documents, they should have been aware that state officials had certified the election results for Joe Biden — it was national and state news. By that point, there was no prospect of changing that outcome through either litigation or legislative action. On the day prosecutors say the fake electors met, two of the most powerful Republicans in the state acknowledged as much. 

Mike Shirkey, the majority leader in the State Senate, and Lee Chatfield, the House speaker, both issued statements declaring the presidential race over. Mr. Shirkey said that Michigan’s “Democratic slate of electors should be able to proceed with their duty” without the threat of harassment or violence.

The fake electors were told they were not allowed to bring their phones into the meeting at the Republican headquarters that day, according to testimony one of them gave congressional investigators. They were instructed to maintain secrecy and not to share any details about what was occurring. That secrecy suggests that they knew what they were doing was wrong.

Michigan’s former secretary of state, Terri Lynn Land, who had been designated a Trump elector, declined to participate in the proceedings, saying, according to Ms. Cox’s testimony, she was not comfortable doing so.

With these facts, it would have been unthinkable for the state attorney general to choose not to prosecute the Michigan 16. Ms. Nessel’s office has regularly brought prosecutions, some of them against her fellow Democrats, centered on false documents in connection with elections. The case of the fake electors is far more egregious than most of those other cases: The defendants here were politically engaged individuals who should have been aware of the election results, as well as the flat rejection by the courts and Michigan Legislature of the Trump campaign’s claims of voter fraud.

To be sure, some critics of the case may still think that the Michigan attorney general should have gone after Mr. Trump and his top lieutenants, who helped organize the false electors. But prosecutors have a responsibility first to pursue those individuals within their jurisdiction. By focusing solely on the figures who undertook their acts in Michigan, Ms. Nessel is wisely insulating her case against charges that she overreached, exceeding her jurisdiction.

Of course, broader prosecutions may still be justified. Reporting indicates that the district attorney for Fulton County, Ga., Fani Willis, may be considering a different kind of wide-ranging case, involving state RICO crimes. Unlike the Michigan prosecution, her case may focus on Mr. Trump’s direct efforts to pressure state election officials — efforts that were caught on tape — and Rudy Giuliani’s attempt to provide false statements of election fraud to state officials.

If broad-based indictments ultimately emerge out of Georgia, and are supported by the facts and appropriate law, then we would welcome it. That is part of the genius of American democracy: The states, which are responsible for running our elections, are laboratories of both democracy and of accountability.

Ms. Nessel’s case also leaves a clear lane for Mr. Smith, the special counsel. She has avoided charging high-level national individuals whom Mr. Smith is apparently investigating. If anything, her case provides greater foundation for Mr. Smith to act, and he now seems to be following through. If Ms. Nessel can move against these individuals in Michigan, Mr. Smith can and should do the same against the ringleaders. Together, they can hold both the foot soldiers and their organizers accountable for their actions leading up to the Capitol riot.

Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, was special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee for the first impeachment and trial of Donald Trump. Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University, is a co-editor in chief of the Just Security website.