Brad Reed
News broke on Wednesday that prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia have launched a criminal probe into former President Donald Trump's infamous phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Rick Hasen, a professor of law and political science at University of California Irvine, writes on Twitter that the criminal case against Trump is "a no brainer legally," and he points to a legal analysis he wrote for Slate earlier this year that makes the case for prosecuting the former president.
In that piece, Hasen zeroed in on Trump asking Raffensperger to "find" the roughly 12,000 votes that he would need to overturn President Joe Biden's win in Georgia.
"In that last sentence, Trump was asking Raffensperger to manufacture enough votes to overturn the results in Georgia based upon nothing but Trump's false accusations of fraud and irregularities," he wrote.
Hasen then pointed to a Georgia statute which states that a "person commits the offense of criminal solicitation to commit election fraud in the first degree when, with intent that another person engage in conduct constituting a felony under this article, he or she solicits, requests, commands, importunes, or otherwise attempts to cause the other person to engage in such conduct."
The most difficult part for prosecutors, Hasen argued, would be proving that Trump had criminal intent to fraudulently overturn the election because it's not clear whether the former president sincerely believes the wild conspiracy theories he often peddles.
"Trump's conspiratorial rantings display either profound ignorance, deep cynicism, or both," he noted.
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