A night view of the White House from Lafeyette Square Park in Washington, D.C.: Glynn Wilson

By Glynn Wilson –

So much for the “law and order” president and his law and order friends, fans and followers and Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud by Democrats. The lawlessness from the Republican White House that dominated the presidential campaign of the hellscape year of 2020 continued into 2021 on Sunday when Trump finally got the Georgia Secretary of State on the telephone and berated and browbeat him to commit election fraud and overturn the state’s duly counted and certified results.

According to official tallies, Joe Biden received 2,473,633 votes in Georgia, 49.5 percent. Trump got 2,461,854 votes, or 49.26 percent. So Biden won by 11,779 votes and the state’s 16 Electoral College votes, as certified by Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

Congress is expected to vote to certify the official election results on Wednesday, Jan. 6, in spite of a challenge by some of Trump’s most ardent Republican sycophants in the House and Senate.

Legal scholars and elected officials say it is unlikely that Trump will be arrested, indicted and charged with any crimes or impeached again for his lawless phone call that remind us all of Trump’s phone call to Ukraine’s president which got him impeached in 2019. Yet those same experts say Trump might have violated Georgia state laws against solicitation of voter fraud and extortion by seeking to exert pressure on Raffensperger to “find the votes” to change the outcome of the election.

“He’s telling the secretary of state to ‘find votes so that I can win — votes that are not due to me,’” Ryan C. Locke, a criminal defense lawyer and former public defender in Atlanta, told the New York Times. “The recording alone is certainly enough to launch an investigation. It’s likely probable cause to issue an indictment.”

One state law makes it a felony to “solicit, request, command, importune or otherwise attempt to cause another person to engage in election fraud.” By urging election officials to “find” votes that were not legally cast for him, Trump could be prosecuted under that law, Locke said. Trump could also be guilty of extortion.

But where is the legal authority and law enforcement officials with the gumption to indict, charge and arrest Trump in the waning days of his administration? For all his followers’ chants of “Lock Her Up,” Trump seems to be the one who needs to be locked up — for the good of the country and the world.

Par for the Course

President-elect Donald J. Trump returns to Mobile, Alabama, in last stop on ‘victory tour.’: Glynn Wilson

This is par for the course for Trump.

In a phone call in 2019, this president pressured President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to begin a bogus investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter and threatened to withhold vital military aid to the country. It was the centerpiece of the scheme for which Trump became the third American president to be impeached for committing high crimes and misdemeanors, a record which cannot be erased from history, in spite of the Republican-controlled Senate’s vote to acquit.

“I just want to find 11,780 votes …” Trump said during the conversation, according to a recording first obtained by The Washington Post, which published it online Sunday.

As he did when he urged Zelensky to “do us a favor,” Trump on Saturday pleaded with Raffensperger to help him politically.

The president, who will be in charge of the Justice Department in the Executive Branch for the 17 days left in his administration, claimed that Raffensperger and Ryan Germany, the chief lawyer for secretary of state’s office, could be prosecuted criminally if they did not do his bidding.

“You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” the president said during the call. “You know, that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. That’s a big risk.”

“The effort to cajole and bully elected officials in his own party — which some legal experts said could be prosecuted under Georgia law — was a remarkable act by a defeated president to crash through legal and ethical boundaries as he seeks to remain in power,” the Times reports. “By any standard measure, the election has long been over. Every state in the country has certified its vote, and a legal campaign by Mr. Trump to challenge the results has been met almost uniformly with quick dismissals by judges across the country, including a Supreme Court with a conservative majority.”

Trump urged Raffensperger to address “discrepancies” before Tuesday’s Senate runoff election in Georgia, one that will decide the balance of power in the Senate. Trump is scheduled to campaign Monday night in Georgia for the two Republican incumbents in the runoff, Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.

“I think we should come to a resolution of this before the election,” Trump said. Otherwise, he said, “you’re going to have people just not voting.”

“They don’t want to vote,” he said. “They hate the state. They hate the governor and they hate the secretary of state.”

“The people of Georgia are angry, the people of the country are angry,” he added. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”

Raffensperger politely but firmly rejected the president’s entreaties, standing by the election results in his state and repeatedly insisting that Trump and his allies had been given false information about voter fraud.

“Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong,” he said.

The call from the White House to Raffensperger’s office came on Saturday at 2:41 p.m., after 18 other unanswered calls by the White House switchboard to the office during the past two months, according to a person familiar with the conversation. Saturday’s call was the first time Raffensperger had talked with Trump directly despite the president’s repeated tweets disparaging him.

Officials in the secretary of state’s office recorded Saturday’s call, according to the Times, and Raffensperger told his advisers that he did not want to release a transcript or a recording unless the president attacked state officials or misrepresented what had been discussed, according to sources inside the office.

As expected, that attack came in a tweet on Sunday morning, when Trump claimed that Raffensperger “was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the ‘ballots under table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters’, dead voters, and more. He has no clue!”

“Respectfully, President Trump: What you’re saying is not true,” Raffensperger wrote in response on Twitter. “The truth will come out.”

The recording of the call was made public several hours later.

During the call, the president again embraced untrue conspiracy theories, including debunked charges that ballots in Fulton County, Ga., were shredded and that voting machines operated by Dominion Voting Systems were tampered with and replaced.

In the call, Ryan Germany, the secretary of state’s general counsel, can be heard telling the president that such charges are flatly untrue, even as Trump continues to insists otherwise.

“You should want to have an accurate election. And you’re a Republican,” Trump told Raffensperger, who replied: “We believe that we do have an accurate election.”

Trump kept going: “No, no, no, you don’t, you don’t have, you don’t have, not even close. You guys, you’re off by hundreds of thousands of votes.”

In addition to Trump and Raffensperger, others on the call from the Georgia secretary of state’s office included Germany and Jordan Fuchs, Raffensperger’s deputy. On the line as well were Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, and Cleta Mitchell and Kurt Hilbert, lawyers working for Mr. Trump.

Mitchell and Meadows, who should now be considered co-conspirators, repeatedly sought to challenge the voting in Georgia and pressed Raffensperger to reveal confidential voter data in an effort to back up their claims, but were rebuffed.

Mitchell, a partner at the firm Foley and Lardner, was on the call with Trump despite the fact that nearly all lawyers with top-tier firms have refused to represent the president in his attempts to overturn the election.

The recording is dominated by Trump, who spoke for the bulk of the call, at times interrupting Raffensperger. At one point, when Trump alleged that 5,000 dead people voted in Georgia, Raffensperger said the president was mistaken.

“The actual number were two,” Raffensperger said. “Two. Two people that were dead that voted. And so that’s wrong.”

At another point, when Trump claimed that a video of the vote-counting at State Farm Arena in Atlanta revealed that one employee was guilty of flagrant ballot stuffing, Raffensperger responded that the video was selectively edited by Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani.

“They sliced and diced that video and took it out of context,” Raffensperger said. “The events that transpired are nowhere near what was projected.”

When Germany told the president that some of the accusations had been looked into and deemed untrue by both the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the F.B.I., Trump responded:

“Then they’re incompetent,” he said. “There’s only two answers — dishonesty or incompetence.”

These are charges that could be accurately directed at Trump himself for the job he’s done as president. He is clearly dishonest and incompetent, as the record shows. He has taken a political tactic first used by the Reagan and Bush administrations of saying the opposite of the truth and accusing the other side of being guilty of what they were clearly guilty of to confuse the public, and blown it up to try creating an alternative reality that apparently millions of people are still buying into, considering the number of votes Trump received in the 2020 election.

Scholars, lawyers and journalists have repeatedly called this a threat to democracy itself and a danger to world order.

Reaction

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, speaking at a drive-in rally Sunday for Georgia’s Democratic Senate candidates in Garden City, Ga., said of Trump’s call that it was “the voice of desperation.”

“And it was a bald, baldfaced, bold abuse of power by the president of the United States,” she said.

Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and one of the leaders in the Senate, said the call was “more than a pathetic, rambling, delusional rant,” calling the president “unhinged and dangerous” and saying that Trump’s Republican allies “are putting the orderly and peaceful transition of power in our nation at risk.”

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan, a well known conservative Republican who has largely remained silent in recent weeks, urged his former colleagues on Sunday to abandon their challenge to the results, calling it the most “anti-democratic and anti-conservative act” he could think of.

“The Trump campaign had ample opportunity to challenge election results, and those efforts failed from lack of evidence,” he said. “If states wish to reform their processes for future elections, that is their prerogative. But Joe Biden’s victory is entirely legitimate.”

The 10 living former secretaries of defense, from both parties, echoed that sentiment in an opinion article on Sunday in The Post. They said the military should not be used in any way to alter the outcome of the election, saying: “Governors have certified the results. And the Electoral College has voted. The time for questioning the results has passed.”

The Washington Post is also now reporting that the only Democrat on Georgia’s state election board on Sunday called on Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to investigate possible civil and criminal violations committed by President Trump during a phone call over the weekend in which the president pressured Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat.

David J. Worley, an Atlanta lawyer, said a transcript of the hour-long call, a recording of which was obtained by The Post, amounted to “probable cause” to believe that Trump had violated Georgia election code.

“It’s a crime to solicit election fraud, and asking the secretary to change the votes is a textbook definition of election fraud,” he said in an interview.

Georgia elections board member calls for probe into Trump’s call seeking to pressure Raffensperger

MSNBC is now reporting that two House Democrats are asking FBI Director Wray to open a criminal investigation into President Trump after a leaked phone call showed him pleading with Georgia Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn his state’s election.

NEW: A pair of House Democrats are asking FBI Director Wray to open a criminal investigation into President Trump after a leaked phone call showed him pleading with Georgia Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn his state's election. https://t.co/kuuDeaNEd6 pic.twitter.com/5mPLEfBQ02

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) January 4, 2021

Trump’s friend and conservative country music singer Charlie Daniels may have described Trump best in his hit song “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”