Election lawfare campaign

The Democratic Party has given up trying to run a conventional election campaign, intended to persuade by reasonable means. Vice-President Kamala Harris is now repudiating most of the policy statements she made in three and a half years’ service. But aside from that, she is running a sham campaign. The real action will come in the federal courts, and in various “swing State” courts. This election lawfare campaign has already begun, with filings and rulings that strain credulity.

Election lawfare, federal front: another superseding indictment

Donald J. Trump is under yet another indictment, from a Washington, D.C. grand jury (per Christina Laila, The Gateway Pundit). Special Counsel Jack Smith is trying to salvage his “January 6 case” after the Supreme Court’s Presidential immunity ruling. So he empaneled yet another grand jury and obtained a superseding indictment relating to Trump’s accusation of widespread fraud in the Election of 2020.

The superseding indictment reads like an editorial, not a grand jury instrument. It recasts the government’s case from a year ago. Briefly: Trump lost the Election of 2020. After that, he tried to deceive the American public and to affect the federal government’s certification of the election. (This indictment is already bogus, because a Presidential election is actually fifty separate State elections of Presidential Electors. No “federal government” certification takes place, except in a joint session of Congress, as it convenes with newly elected members.)

Count One of the indictment cites Trump’s election challenges in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (but not Nevada). Then it goes to trying to persuade Vice-President Mike Pence to withhold certification pending investigation of fraud in those States.

Count Two charges Trump under Title 18 U.S.C. Section 1512 (c) – after the Supreme Court already declared such charges invalid. (Fischer v. United States.) Count Three does the same, and Count Four charges “conspiracy against rights,” i.e., voter intimidation.

The only real change in this indictment is that Smith argues that Trump’s acts, being “privately funded and organized,” are not “official.”

State front: selective application of ballot access procedure

We now know definitely some other States in which Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is trying to withdraw from the ballot. They include Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin. A Georgia Administrative Law Judge has already ruled that Kennedy and three other “third party” candidates may not run. Apparently Georgia law now requires petitioning at-large and in each Congressional district for named Presidential Electors. This affects candidates Jill Stein, Cornel West, and Claudia De la Cruz. In addition, ALJ Michael Malihi accepted New York’s determination that Kennedy’s New York address was a sham address. (Source: Fox Five Atlanta.) Of course, Kennedy doesn’t mind that, because he wants off the ballot in Georgia, after endorsing Donald Trump.

In contrast, election officials of Michigan and Wisconsin refuse to take Kennedy’s name off the ballot. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said third-party candidates may not withdraw. But she earlier tried to throw Cornel West off the ballot. (A judge says he stays.) Her excuse is that Kennedy has the nomination of the Natural Law Party, which is not a Kennedy organization.

Likewise the Wisconsin Election Commission voted 5-1 to keep Kennedy’s name, and two other third-party names, on that State’s ballot. They cited the same excuse: Wisconsin law forbids someone to decline a nomination. Earlier, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that Green Party candidate Jill Stein must stay on the ballot.

Direct threats against county election officials

In arguably the worst example yet of election lawfare, Michigan’s SOS directly threatened local general registrars. If any of them refuses certification of election results, she said:

If someone were to violate the law, and not certify the election at the local level, we will come for you. So any local certifiers, thinking of skirting the law and not certifying the vote, don’t even think about it, because… [cuts off]

Exactly what law any registrar would violate by refusing certification, is far from clear. But this threat echoes a similar threat by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland:

He was actually talking about “peaceful transfer[s] of power” and the Congressional joint session that takes place every January.

The Michigan Attorney General seemed to threaten prosecution of Trump for “enlisting as many Republican poll workers, clerks and activists as possible.”

Thus for the first time, a State Attorney General has suggested that assurance of parity in Party affiliation of Officers of Election is unlawful.

Motives of the election lawfare campaign

The motives of the election lawfare campaign are relatively easy to discern. Jack Smith is literally trying to protect his job. Judge Aileen Cannon of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida made it official. Jack Smith does not have a proper Constitutional appointment as an Officer of the United States. In his concurrence in the Presidential immunity case, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested the same – independently of Judge Cannon. Smith has appealed to the Eleventh Circuit, and filed a brief defending his appointment. While that case is pending, he is trying to keep his other case alive in the face of the Supreme Court’s immunity primer. That case could affect the future of the very concept of “special counsel.”

Certain officials – and judges – are literally trying to protect their own shared ideology. This includes a Justice of the Supreme Court – Ketanji Brown Jackson. Recently she told a CBS reporter that the Supreme Court must “be prepared to respond” to an election challenge.

Justice Jackson has an annoying tendency to treat the Court as a Court of equity, not of legal review. She is part of the Liberal Bloc, and therefore has written and joined many more dissents than majority opinions.

Michigan Secretary of State Benson apparently has lost eight challenges to her elections policy decisions. If she dares prosecute any county registrar for failing to certify an election on demand, that could result in the ninth challenge.

Setbacks to the election lawfare campaign

The Democratic Party election lawfare campaign has seen several recent setbacks. These go beyond Cornel West and Jill Stein staying on the ballots in Michigan and Wisconsin, respectively. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes is trying to prosecute Trump’s “alternate electors” in that State. The trial judge ruled yesterday that the defendants may present evidence of political motive for the prosecution.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has been raiding the homes of some Latino Democrats, looking for evidence of conspiracy to commit election fraud. This comes as Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Texas) boasted of removing more than a million ineligible voters from the rolls. The overwhelming bulk of these are dead and move-outs. But they include about six thousand non-citizens, two thousand of whom have voting histories. General Paxton has announced his intention to prosecute them all.

Yesterday, Nicole Shanahan (likely pronounced “Shannon”), former running mate of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., shared some disturbing thoughts on her treatment by New York’s courts in the New York ballot access case:

I’ll admit I used to kind of roll my eyes when people claimed that President Trump was being “persecuted.” I was looking at it through the distorted filter of the media. Well, I just completed my first cross-examination in our second New York Ballot Access case, where the DNC-aligned PAC attorneys questioned me like a criminal. OK, I get it now. Our justice system is clearly being co-opted and abused by nefarious people with malevolent political agendas.

New York’s courts might be the worst offenders, but they’re not the only ones. In any case, a former independent candidate has now exposed them.

At noon yesterday, Donald Trump gave an interview to former Navy SEAL Shawn Ryan.

In that interview, Trump discussed the problem of a new President who knew no one in the capital city. He also explicitly vowed to hold certain “crooked” and “dishonest” people “accountable.”

The Zuckerberg Confession

But the Zuckerberg Confession probably provides the strongest motive for – and evidence exposing – the election lawfare campaign. Mark Zuckerberg fully confessed, yesterday, to complicity in government censorship and election interference. By order of the Biden-Harris administration, he suppressed evidence that:

• Coronavirus was a threat only to the lives of the chronically ill, and
• The vaccines against it were the real threat, that still manifests itself in the “sudden deaths” of star athletes.

He also withheld information that, if released, would have affected the votes of millions, and took part in suppressing information about election fraud. Today the de facto officer doctrine – a sort of statute of limitations on unlawful appointments – makes it impossible to challenge any of President Biden’s judicial, administrative, or other appointments. But that confession will certainly revive efforts to stop such censorship. Wayne Allen Root suggests that it could also provide evidence for criminal prosecutions of many Biden administration officials. And not only these, but drug-company executives, and career hangers-on at America’s “three-letter agencies.”

The Democrats know this, and several ideologically corrupt lawyers, judges, and agency heads know it, too. That explains the election lawfare campaign. Ironically, those waging it have made it, and themselves, insultingly obvious. This will result in its failure in the only venue that matters: the polling places.