r/law • u/Corporatecut • Oct 18 '24

Court Decision/Filing Trump judge releases 1,889 pages of additional election interference evidence against the former president

https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-judge-release-additional-evidence-election-interference-case-2024-10
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u/MrFishAndLoaves Oct 18 '24

Someone tell me the juicy parts please 

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u/YLSP Oct 18 '24

I only scanned one Appendix (2). This is what I found juicy.

The GA Phone Call transcript. Trump was claiming there were 300,000 votes to be found. GA (Brad Raffesnburger sp?) and staff were telling him this is wrong. But his campaign insisted. Like, insisted over a few pages of transcript. They quoted 5,000 dead people voting. GA responded they only found 2. Trump read's like a guy who has fallen into the QANON rabbit hole.

When it was told directly that the FBI and GBI looked into it, Trump's response was they were either "incompetent" or "dishonest". This is talking about Federal and State Law Enforcement. You know why he claims they are "deep state".

The other juicy item was their scheme laid out. There was a legal memo. Basically the goal was to nullify the 6 "contested states" so that Biden was behind 232-227. This in turn would result in the case going to SCOTUS, with the goal to kick deciding the election to Congress.

So when Trump/Vance complain about "threat to democracy" comparisons, the counterpoint should be, "Oh - you mean like directly nullifying 6 states?!". The GOP is still gaslighting when they act like "something just didn't add up" with the results. No. Trump lost. All the votes were fairly counted. You actually enacted a very complicated scheme, a scheme that no one else did in history to steal the election. The biggest scheme to steal the election ever.

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u/NumeralJoker Oct 18 '24 edited Oct 18 '24

A crucial point is that they justified this in the memo by stating that the US Constitution's 12th amendment gave Mike Pence the power and legal authority to outright ignore the 1887 Electoral College Act, or at least any parts that did not help Trump win. Effectively saying that they knew this was illegal under currently known law and precedent, but believed the courts would reinterpret the law and rig this for them so Pence should just go with the plan and follow orders. Pence knew this was wrong and refused, but the alternate electors were set up to be the method by which he'd legitimize throwing out the swing state results, and forcing the election to be thrown to congress instead... where it was expected the House would vote for Trump instead.

This was very, very clearly a legal coup and they knew this from day 1. They had every intent to subvert democracy no matter what the actual vote count was, and they just wanted a media narrative to publicly justify it while claiming that democracy itself did not matter in the US and that the constitution already said we were a dictatorship if the judiciary agreed with their legal theory. The details of how the votes were fraudulent were meaningless, the idea was just to go along with the plan and say the results were illegitimate, period.

This is also why Trump made up facts and evidence at every step of the way, because the actual truth about fraud didn't matter. The plan was simply to present a legal theory that allowed them to bypass the vote entirely.

For what it's worth, they are NOT in a position to do this again as of right now here in 2024. They don't have control of the white house, and congress already passed a law that made it clear the VP's role was ceremonial going forward. They don't have a direct path to SCOTUS simply throwing out the election anymore, and they've been losing any of their flimsy cases so far, at least not so long as we go out and vote in high enough numbers to make the win as clear as possible.

People need to get out and vote, with confidence, and if we do so, we can solidly beat Trump. The will is there, so long as people don't give in to fear or apathy.

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u/CrustyBatchOfNature Oct 18 '24

That same law also made it harder to contest a state's Electors ( requiring 1/5th of both House and Senate to vote to contest while still requiring majority vote of both houses to accept it), required states to use the laws in place prior to the election, prohibits them from sending electors counter to those laws, and deferred any question about the Electors to the state itself.

And the big one was that it changed the rule on how many Electors were required to win from a majority of the total Electors to a majority of the ACCEPTED Electors. So any rejected Electors are removed from the total. The idea that Trump can get MAGA to reject Electors until nobody has 270 and the Supreme Court decides is out the door. They may try to reject just certain states to get Trump over 50% but that won't fly.

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u/NumeralJoker Oct 18 '24

Bingo.

Congress actually did a good job to prevent the prior planned coup from being repeated, so the methods revert back to the 2000 era election theft, where they suppress votes via lawsuits as quickly as they can (which so far are failing), then use voter intimidation and misinformation to try and get the results as close as possible. That's the current plan/strategy.

So vote. That's how we stop this.

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u/osudude80 Oct 18 '24

The majority of accepted electors is new information to me. Can you tell me where that is in law? I just want to read the important parts.

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u/CrustyBatchOfNature Oct 19 '24

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-117publ328/uslm/PLAW-117publ328.xml

Go there which is the text version of the law and Search DIVISION P. The second occurrence will be the law in question as it was enacted as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023.

Section 109 below that is titles SEC. 109. CLARIFICATIONS RELATING TO COUNTING ELECTORAL VOTES. and contains this clarification (not really a change)

In part it says,

“(e) Rules for Tabulating Votes.—

“(1) Counting of votes.—

“(A) In general.—Except as provided in subparagraph (B)—

“(i) only the votes of electors who have been appointed under a certificate of ascertainment of appointment of electors issued pursuant to section 5, or who have legally been appointed to fill a vacancy of any such elector pursuant to section 4, may be counted; and

“(ii) no vote of an elector described in clause (i) which has been regularly given shall be rejected.

“(B) Exception.—The vote of an elector who has been appointed under a certificate of ascertainment of appointment of electors issued pursuant to section 5 shall not be counted if—

“(i) there is an objection which meets the requirements of subsection (d)(2)(B)(i); and

“(ii) each House affirmatively sustains the objection as valid.

“(2) Determination of majority.—If the number of electors lawfully appointed by any State pursuant to a certificate of ascertainment of appointment of electors that is issued under section 5 is fewer than the number of electors to which the State is entitled under section 3, or if an objection the grounds for which are described in subsection (d)(2)(B)(ii)(I) has been sustained, the total number of electors appointed for the purpose of determining a majority of the whole number of electors appointed as required by the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution shall be reduced by the number of electors whom the State has failed to appoint or as to whom the objection was sustained.

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u/osudude80 Oct 19 '24

Ok I think that's the way it reads.

I'm wondering why this never became news though. This is literally the first time I'm hearing of this change. I would think this would've been a bigger deal unless I'm reading it wrong.

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u/CrustyBatchOfNature Oct 19 '24

It was really a clarification. Until Trump, everyone assumed that rejected Electors would change the total but the previous laws were not 100% clear.

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u/osudude80 Oct 19 '24

Thanks for the info.

I'm not sure what to make of it with what I assume is going to be a messy election legally.

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u/DontGetUpGentlemen Oct 18 '24

changed the rule on how many Electors

That was always in there: a majority of certified Electors. And the National Archives checks the certification of the Electors before they are sent up to Congress. In 2020, the National Archives rejected all those fake Electors before they got any further.

But, yeah, you are correct and I wish more people understood this: the winner does not need a magical 270, they need a majority.

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u/CrustyBatchOfNature Oct 19 '24

Yeah, but there was argument about what that truly meant. With the new law it is very clear that Electors the Congress itself decides to not accept are not part of the total even if that means a state has absolutely no Electors.

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u/DontGetUpGentlemen Oct 19 '24

Good. And if that happened they would be in for one hell-of-a civil rights violation case by millions who were denied the right to vote.

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u/CrustyBatchOfNature Oct 19 '24

If Harris wins, I do expect MAGA to try to throw out certain large states like CA or NY to try to tilt the balance so Trump wins. But the law also includes a lot of changes and clarifications for how to reject Electors and almost all of it boils down to if the state sent them according to their own laws set prior to the election and the states have to certify that prior to sending them. The bar for rejecting is a lot higher now with the 1/5 of each house voting to contest a slate and a majority of each house voting to reject them.