One chart legal expert says could be used in the indictment of Trump's conspiracy to overthrow the election
In a live Labor Day special by Ari Melber, former federal prosecutor John P. Flannery pointed to the one chart he says is more than a mere diagram of the attempt to overthrow the election, but the perfect presentation of information that could be used to indict former President Donald Trump.
In a timeline, Melber showed the beginning of the Electors plot, the lawsuits and states attempting to overturn the 2020 votes in November. As December approached, that turned into Republican congressional officials coordinating to vote down the election certification, a lobbying effort began to get Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the 2020 election, the attempt to get the military to seize voting machines, and the plotting of the Jan. 6 attack.
Thus far, it appears that the investigations have only focused on what happened involving the Jan. 6 attack and how it began. But Melber argued that looking all the way back at the efforts in November is important in understanding the insurrection. You can't pin an insurrection on one speech, he argued. But it wasn't one act. It was months of efforts leading up to Jan. 6
"I think it's a devastating indictment in an informal sense of what went wrong and how the desire to win when one lost overcame all lawful constitutional, legal and other normal barriers so that they could replace themselves in an election that they lost," Flannery said. "And I think that what you have shown is with that original intent, as they are moving forward, even through the legal cases, there's a pattern of conduct there that tells us, from the very beginning, 'we just say we won, even though we didn't.' So, you go into court, and you claim there's been misconduct, and there's not. You claim there is fraud, and there's not. And you accumulate 50 cases, and then you use the fact that you lost to try to get electors. And we move into your zone, where it becomes, without question, a crime. And you walk it up the ladder from that."
He continued: "So, could you take your charts and turn them into an indictment? Yes, you could. It could be a single conspiracy, that is to say, all these people were connected, and all knew what was going to happen, and all planned out was going to happen. That had various means to do it, and their objective was to overturn the election."
Flannery walked through the chart, showing that the lawsuits were "green" because it's completely legal to bring a lawsuit.
"However, you can't bring a lawsuit based on the false fact, or on a frivolous cause of action," said Flannery. "If he did it in one case, that would be one thing. When you have so many cases, you have a pattern of conduct of rebutting and innocent intent. What happens next? The electors are persuaded by the lawsuits that there's fraud [and] that we need alternative electors, so it could overturn the election as if the lawsuits were real and genuine, and they were not. We do know that the Justice Department is investigating the electors."
The chart then moves into the states, Congress and former Vice President Mike Pence.
"That is the motherlode," Flannery explained. "You are at a point where to take the theory that they can vote on what the electors did or didn't do, first of all, that wasn't the law. Second of all, the facts they are relying on are, themselves, fraudulent. They made the same pitch to the states. You see [Rudy] Giuliani and company doing that. They made the same pitch to Congress, and we have [Mark] Meadows and [Peter] Navarro and others in dealing with that. We have Pence, we have Trump himself trying to persuade Pence to do the dirty deed."
Finally, the last piece of the puzzle was that Trump allies at the Justice Department attempted to challenge states on the grounds that there are "questions" and thus shouldn't be counted.
"Just before the final chapter, they have the DOJ coming in to give in an extra push in Georgia and elsewhere to prosecute this crazy meshugana theory of the law to overturn an election illegally," Flannery closed. "It's a cuckoo coup, I suppose. I think it all holds up. We have enough public evidence to know this, and these people do it with several people present. So, it's not going to be hard to charge. The shame is that some of these people haven't been in the grand jury, but others have, recently.
See the full explanation in the video below:
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