( Michigan Advance ) – Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said she “wasn’t surprised” by news that former President Donald Trump allegedly pressured Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers to refuse to sign the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

Benson, a Democrat who spent most of 2020 warning about the potential for disinformation over election results, told CNN that the revelation, first reported late Thursday night by the Detroit News, was further evidence of Trump’s efforts to upend a free and fair election.

“It’s quite extraordinary,” said Benson. “We had a gut feeling and had lots of different pieces of evidence to suggest that this was happening. So, I wasn’t surprised by anything that was revealed or any of the revelations in the recording.”

The News said it had reviewed a recording of a phone call Trump made on Nov. 17, 2020, to the two GOP Wayne County canvassers, Monica Palmer and William Hartmann. 

“We’ve got to fight for our country,” the News reported Trump said on the recording. “We can’t let these people take our country away from us.”

Also reportedly on the call, which the News said was recorded by a person present with Palmer and Hartmann at the time, was Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, a Wayne County resident and niece of U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah).

“If you can go home tonight, do not sign [the certification]. … We will get you attorneys,” McDaniel is reported to have told Palmer and Hartmann. 

Trump is then said to have added: “We’ll take care of that.”

President Joe Biden, a Democrat, won Michigan over GOP President Donald Trump by over 154,000 votes. Biden secured about 68% of the votes cast for president in Wayne County and Trump received about 31% of votes in the county. The blue county is home to Detroit, Michigan’s largest city and is 79% African American.

After initially voting against certifying the Wayne County election results, Palmer and Hartmann relented after sharp criticism from members of the public and voted to approve them, as the Advance reported at the time. 

Benson said on social media that moment was a turning point.

“Hundreds – hundreds (!) – of citizens showed up to the meeting of the Wayne County Canvassing Board to remind them of their duty under the law to ensure their votes counted,” she said. “Their voices mattered. Their votes mattered. In my view that turned the tide. Citizens and election officials in Wayne County and statewide didn’t flinch, stood firm, and demanded their votes be certified as required under the law.”

However, the News says it was 30 minutes after the meeting ended that Trump called, saying it would look “terrible” if they ended up signing the certification after initially voting in opposition.

Former President Donald J. Trump is seen in silhouette holding an umbrella as he talks to members of the press on the South Lawn of the White House Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2019, prior to boarding Marine One to begin his trip to Hershey, Pa. | Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian via Flickr Public Domain

Following the phone call, Palmer and Hartmann left the canvassers meeting without signing the official certification document. Then they tried to rescind their votes the following day, an effort that proved unsuccessful and paved the way for certification in Wayne County, but also ultimately at the state level, confirming Joe Biden’s win in Michigan. He would be awarded all 16 of the state’s electoral votes.

“Had Trump succeeded in delaying or preventing a county or statewide certification in Michigan, that precedent would have been used to delay or block certification in Pennsylvania (which was certifying the following week), Georgia and so on, paving the way for the false slate of electors. We knew we were the first domino to go and that what Michigan did would impact the others,” said Benson on the social media platform X.

Trump also met with Michigan GOP leaders in the White House on Nov. 20, 2020, including former Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey (R-Clarklake) and House Speaker Lee Chatfield (R-Levering). Republicans have claimed they weren’t pressured to overturn election results.

The News reported that while Hartmann has since died, neither Palmer nor McDaniel and Trump, through spokespeople, disputed a summary of the phone call when presented to them. The paper noted, however, that Palmer in the past described the conversation with Trump as, “Thank you for your service. I’m glad you’re safe. Have a good night.”

The News said those comments weren’t included in the segments of the call the paper reviewed.

McDaniel, a former Michigan GOP chair, said she stands by her statements made at the time that there was “ample evidence” that warranted an election audit. 

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told the paper that Trump’s actions “were taken in furtherance of his duty as president of the United States to faithfully take care of the laws and ensure election integrity, including investigating the rigged and stolen 2020 presidential election.”

Despite continued allegations of election fraud, no evidence has been validated, while multiple judges, many of them Trump appointees, have rejected every legal attempt to overturn the results.

Trump also faces both state and federal charges for illegally attempting to interfere in the election process. 

The day following the phone call to Palmer and Hartmann, Trump further boosted the pressure to stop the certification by making unproven and inaccurate statements.

“The numbers have not improved, it is still 71% out of balance”, stated Wayne County, Michigan,  Canvassers. “There is widespread irregularities in poll numbers.” There are “more votes than people”. The two harassed patriot Canvassers refuse to sign the papers!,” he posted on social media.

Similar false conspiracies were later brought up during a now-infamous Michigan House committee meeting featuring Rudy Giuliani, who was then serving as Trump’s personal attorney. Giuliani, who is also facing charges in Georgia for election interference, filed for bankruptcy on Thursday, days after a jury ordered him to pay nearly $150 million to two former Georgia election workers for defamation.

Peter Bondi, managing director of the nonprofit Informing Democracy, expressed concern about what Trump will do after the 2024 election if he loses again.

“Following Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, it’s easy to predict that he will loudly call for every local election official to refuse to certify the results of the election in 2024. What we can’t predict is how many will actually listen to him,” Bondi said. “Unfortunately, from what we’ve seen in Michigan, Arizona, and elsewhere, we know that some may follow his command, breaking their oath and disregarding the votes of the citizens they’ve sworn to serve — and in many cases breaking the law.”

Benson, meanwhile, was asked by CNN’s Abby Phillip that in light of the recording, if she thought charges should be sought against Palmer or McDaniel.

“I have great faith in our Attorney General Dana Nessel,” she responded. “She just today announced charges in a very different inquiry against former state employees for abusing their power [Robert and Anne Minard]. So when the law is violated, she will ensure there is accountability. So we’ll see how that unfolds. I think the other thing to remember here is at the end of the day, the commissioners and folks on the Wayne County Board of Canvassers did their job. They certified the election, as the state board did as well. So despite attempts to bribe or cajole or interfere, influence, it was unsuccessful. And democracy prevailed, in part because hundreds of citizens showed up that night to demand that the law be followed. And indeed, it ultimately was.”

Mark Brewer, an elections lawyer and former Michigan Democratic Party chair, was more blunt.

“Lock ‘em up: Trump, Palmer, Ronna Romney McDaniel, and everyone else who was part of this criminal scheme,” he posted.

Jon King

Jon King is the Senior Reporter for the Michigan Advance and has been a journalist for more than 35 years. He is the Past President of the Michigan Associated Press Media Editors Association and has been recognized for excellence numerous times, most recently in 2022 with the Best Investigative Story by the Michigan Association of Broadcasters. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Cleary University. Jon and his family live in Howell.

Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Michigan Advance

Applying a different standard to a powerful person reflects only contempt for the rule of law.

Mitchell Zimmerman

Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller Mississippi Reckoning.

Alphonse “Scarface” Capone (d. 1947) was a liquor smuggler in Chicago and head of an organized crime conspiracy in that city. When bars declined to take their covert supplies under the table from Capone, he had them blown up. Some 100 persons died in this massive terror campaign, and they were only a small number of his victims. This is how he tried to present himself in one of his mug shots — sober, unworried, defiant. In fact, he was an impetuous, vain, violent man. Like Trump, Inc., he did not pay his taxes, and ultimately went down for it.

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1920s Prison Mug Shot Of Gangster Scarface Al Capone Looking At Camera Chicago Illinois US. (Photo by Charles Phelps Cushing/Classicstock/Getty Images)

Or here’s a young John Gotti, looking distinctly unreformed and unreformable. He became an enforcer for the Gambino family in New York, specializing in narcotics trafficking and loansharking, not to mention murder. In fact, he took over the Gambino crime family after having his competition removed. In 1985, he had his rival for the top post, Aniello Dellacroce, gunned down in front of a restaurant, in the same way that Trump tried to erase Joe Biden’s presidential victory by violence on the part of his shock troops. In 1990, FBI agents and NYPD detectives, having carefully built a case against him with authorized electronic surveillance and using his close associate “Sammy the Bull” Gravano as an informant, arrested Gotti on “multiple counts of racketeering, extortion, jury tampering, and other crimes.” Here is another similarity to Trump, who was also charged with racketeering. Like Gotti, Trump was viewed as likely to threaten and tamper with the jury. In Gotti’s case the jurors remained anonymous.

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In this handout, Italian-American gangster John Gotti (1940 – 2002) in a mug shot, US, 30th March 1965. (Photo by Kypros/Getty Images)

Finally, let us consider another populist politician, this time a Democrat, James Traficant of Ohio. A sitting congressman, he was convicted in 2002 of 10 counts of racketeering, bribery and fraud. Traficant defended John Demjanjuk, a retired auto worker who was accused of having been a Nazi prison camp guard and who was extradited to Germany. He stood against foreclosure on some of his constituents’ homes. But he was thought to be in the back pocket of organized crime in northern Ohio. In a different era, he hit some of the same notes of popular discontent as Trump later would. But like Trump, he was corrupt to the core and his methods were often criminal. Like Trump, no one knew what to make of his hair. He does not look so much angry in his mug shot as smug and confident, unbowed, and in a way defiant. He insisted on defending himself at his trial. There is an old saw that a man who defends himself has a fool for a client. He lost badly, and became the first representative to be expelled from Congress since the Civil War era. There may be another parallel here, in that Trump may end up being ineligible for office because of his various crimes, according to the 14th amendment.

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UNDATED PHOTO: Former U.S. Rep. James Traficant (D-OH) is seen in this undated photo. Traficant was sentenced July 30, 2002 to eight years in prison for bribery, tax evasion and racketeering. The House of Representatives voted 420-1 to expel him last week, making Traficant only the second member of Congress kicked out since the Civil War. (Photo by Summit County Jail/Getty Images)

We can leave aside those presidents tried for crimes against humanity and massacres, such as Saddam Hussein of Iraq (executed in 2006) or Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia. Trump rode roughshod over people’s civil rights, including in Portland, Or. and Lafayette Park, but those are not among the charges against him. He stands accused of sedition and conspiracy to overturn an election. There also isn’t a good parallel to South Korea, which has routinely tried and imprisoned former presidents on embezzlement and corruption charges. Although there are questions about whether the Trumps illicitly used the White House to enrich themselves further, DJT is not being tried on those grounds.

The closes parallel is former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who faces as many as 16 trials, one of which began in June. He is charged with spreading misinformation about the election in the months leading up to it. If found guilty he could be barred from politics for 8 years.

In 2019, former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf was convicted of treason because he had suspended the country’s constitution in 2007. Musharraf made a military coup against elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in 1999 and held a phony referendum, whereby he because president. This is not so hard since in a referendum you have no opponent and the only candidate people can vote for is you. Musharraf was not the first military dictator to make himself president of Pakistan, in fact he was the fourth, after Generals Ayyub Khan, Yahya Khan, and Zia ul-Haq.

Musharraf, however, went further than ruling according to provisions in the constitution for a national emergency. In 2007 he dismissed the Supreme Court and replaced it with one to his liking, and in November of that year he actually set aside the constitution, restoring it a month later, in December.

Pakistan was in so much turmoil that Musharraf couldn’t control the situation, so he agreed to the holding of new elections in 2008, won by Asaf Ali Zardari after his wife, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated. Musharraf went into exile. The legal establishment, however, still minded his attempt to tinker with it and in 2013 they began proceedings against him for treason in connection with his suspension of the constitution. In 2019 the trial in absentia wrapped up with Musharraf being sentenced to death. The pawerful Pakistani officer corps had lobbied against one of their own being treated like this, but to no avail. Musharraf was sentenced to death in absentia, given that he lived in Dubai then. He died on Feb. 5, 2023.

Since US prosecutors have not considered Trump’s crimes to constitute a form of treason, he does not face the death penalty, though he is 77, so he could easily die in jail if he is convicted and imprisoned. In Georgia, he can’t get less than five years if he is convicted of the racketeering and other charges, because of mandatory sentencing guidelines. He also cannot be paroled or pardoned before spending 5 years in prison.

An Atlanta, Georgia, grand jury indicted former President Donald Trump on Aug. 14, 2023, charging him with racketeering and 12 other felonies related to his alleged attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat in the state.

Eighteen of Trump’s allies and associates, including former Trump attorney Rudolph Giuliani and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, were also indicted for racketeering and other felony charges for their alleged involvement in the scheme.

This marks Trump’s fourth indictment in five months – and the second to come from his efforts to undo the election results that awarded the presidency to Joe Biden. Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, started investigating Trump’s involvement in this alleged scheme, as well as that of Trump’s colleagues, in February 2021.

In January 2021, one month before the investigation started, Trump placed a phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and pressed him to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s win.

The Conversation U.S. spoke with Anthony Michael Kreis, a scholar of Georgia’s election laws, to understand the significance of the charges laid out in the 98-page indictment. Here are five key points to understand about the precise nature of the charges and why racketeering is at the center of them.

1. Racketeering is different from conspiracy charges

With a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, charge, Willis presents a narrative that there were a large number of people involved in this case, but that they didn’t necessarily sit down at some point and over cocktails and say, “We are going to engage in this criminal act,” which would be a traditional conspiracy case. She is painting this picture of people winking and nodding and working toward this end goal of overthrowing the election, but without some kind of expressed agreement.

The Georgia RICO law allows her to rope in a lot of people who allegedly were involved with this kind of approach.

To be able to bring conspiracy charges, she would have to have an expressed agreement and a concrete act in furtherance of that conspiracy. And here there really wasn’t quite a plan – it is essentially a loose organization of people who are all up to no good.

2. Georgia – and Willis – have used racketeering charges before

Traditionally in Georgia, RICO has been used to prosecute people engaged in very violent kinds of activity – for street gangs and the Mafia, in particular. It has also been used in other contexts.

When major Hollywood actors and directors, and sports coaches, were implicated on sexual harassment charges, they were put on trial and their credentials were taken away. They faced hefty fines. Even the 45th President of the U.S., Donald Trump, has been indicted for sexual harassment and rape, for misappropriating government documents, and now, for seeking to overturn a national election and invalidate the Constitution.

In many countries in the Middle East, matters tend to be different. Even if those charged are found guilty, they and their backers can buy judges, lawyers and prosecutors.

Recently, a scandal involving corruption broke in Gilan, a province in northern Iran.

In Gilan, two men, holding high positions of power, both in charge of the local branch of the “vice and virtue” department, while holding others responsible for “indecent behavior,” are now accused of engaging in sodomy. Sodomy in the Penal Code of the Islamic Republic carries a severe penalty, lashes and, potentially, the death sentence.

“All sexual activities that occur outside a traditional, heterosexual marriage (i.e., sodomy or adultery) are illegal. Same-sex sexual activities that occur between consenting adults are criminalized and carry a maximum punishment of death—though not generally implemented.”

Almost a year ago, Mahsa Amini, the young Kurdish woman who became a global symbol of women’s struggle in Iran, was beaten to death for having a little hair shown. The man who hit her on the head and caused her death was never tried nor taken to jail. He was protected by a judicial system that is utterly corrupt.

A revolutionary situation ensued. Some called it the first feminist movement in the world. All over Iran and the world people came out in the streets to show support for Iranian women in their quest for equality and their wish to be free of mandatory hijab and other restrictions.

Now there are at least two well-known cases, one of a married cleric who went on TV and preached piousness while at night engaged in sodomy with his brother-in-law. His name is Mehdi Hagh Shenas and he has long been the direct representative of Supreme Leader Khamenei in Gilan. He is shown in one of his TV shows, in clerical robes, discussing the cause-and-effect relationship between sin and illness. “Lacking decency and moral depravity are both sinful,” he proclaimed.

Then there is the case a Mr Seghati, who also engaged in sexual relations with a man while he held the position of the director of what is called the Department of Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong, a moral injunction that goes back to the Koran.

A few years ago, Saeed Tousi, Khamenei’s favorite Koran reader was exposed as a child sex predator, taking young boys to Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca and raping several of them. A court acquitted him.

In an interview with BBC Persian, he denied reports that the office of the Supreme Leader had influenced the outcome in his case.

The young cleric who engaged in sexual relations and text messages with his in-law suffered the harshest punishment meted out for this kind of behavior by being defrocked; others were temporarily marginalized and then given other positions. All the while, hundreds of women and men are stopped, detained, and given long sentences for harboring the ordinary desires of any young person.

In the Islamic Republic of Iran, those who commit crimes and are closely related to Khamenei’s beyt (household) have never been held responsible. They are protected by the system–a corrupt system that holds the victim in contempt and releases the criminal.

In 2021, a blogger and the founder of Amad News, Ruhollah Zam, whose father had named him after Ruhollah Khomeini, exposed the corruption of the regime’s officials. He was later abducted while traveling to Iraq from France, kidnapped, and taken to Iran. He was in prison for nearly a year and later, without ever being told that he had been sentenced to death, was executed.

The married judge who sentenced him to death had also texted with a woman asking for sexual favors.

Ruhollah Zam’s crime? He had exposed a regime of corruption.

A year later, his father, who had worked closely with the regime, defiantly took off his clerical robe in protest of his son’s unjust execution.

When asked in a townhall meeting in NYC, at Columbia university in 2005, the then newly elected President of Iran Ahmadi Nejad responded to a question about the suppression of gays in Iran, by saying that “We don’t have gays in Iran!” eliciting laughter from the audience.

Hypocrisy is rife in many places. Arguably the most notable example in this country is that of Trump’s personal lawyer, Roy Cohn, who went after gays (and communists) during the McCarthy era and later came out of closet. He was the epitome of evil.

In Iran, too, “pious” men are often the most hypocritical and dishonest men who, not only engage in lewd behavior, but engage in unspeakable suppression of our women. This is the well-known problem of clergy malfeasance, from which Iran is not immune, to say the least.

They have never been tried nor held responsible.

Such are the laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and such laws must be eliminated.

Iran needs a total overhaul in every sector and in every aspect of its society especially in its corrupt judicial system.

 

( Michigan Advance ) – After Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced charges Tuesday against 16 Michigan residents tied to a scheme to submit false electoral votes in support of former President Donald Trump, elections experts and GOP officials are responding to the charges.

“My department has prosecuted numerous cases of election law violations throughout my tenure, and it would be malfeasance of the greatest magnitude if my department failed to act here,” Nessel said in a statement released Tuesday.

According to an affidavit in support of the charges filed by Howard Shock, a special agent investigator with the Michigan Department of Attorney General, 14 out of 16 individuals identified to the state as Republican Party candidates for elector allegedly met at the Michigan Republican party headquarters on Dec. 14, 2020. 

The 14 electors, alongside Kenneth Thompson and James Renner, who were chosen to replace the absent elector candidates Terri Lynn Land, a former secretary of state, and Gerald Wall are believed to have signed a number of documents as the “duly elected and qualified Electors for President and Vice President of the United States of America from the State of Michigan,” including a document submitting 16 electoral votes for former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence. 

Neither Land nor Wall signed these documents. 

According to the affidavit, the individuals who signed the documents falsely asserted their status as duly elected and qualified electors, in addition to claiming they met in the state Capitol. 

Instead, the lawfully designated electors met in the Capitol in Lansing on Dec. 14, 2020, following state and federal law, and cast their votes unanimously for President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who won the state by more than 154,000 votes.

Here are the 16 people charged:

Kathy Berden, 70, of Snover: A Michigan Republican national committeewoman.

William (Hank) Choate, 72, of Cement City: Served as chairman of the Jackson County Republican Party.

Amy Facchinello, 55, of Grand Blanc: A trustee on the Grand Blanc Board of Education who ran on right-wing values and has posted QAnon content on social media.

Clifford Frost, 75, of Warren: Ran for the 28th District seat in the state House of Representatives in 2020, but lost in the Republican primary.

Stanley Grot, 71, of Shelby Township: A GOP powerbroker in Macomb County, serving on the Shelby Township Board of Trustees. as well as the township clerk. In 2018, he ran for secretary of state but abruptly dropped out of the race, which became the center of an alleged payoff scandal that resulted in then-Michigan Party Chair Ron Weiser paying a $200,000 state fine for violating campaign finance law.

John Haggard, 82, of Charlevoix: A plaintiff in a case against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. 

Mari-Ann Henry, 65, of Brighton: As of June 29, 2022, Henry’s LinkedIn listed her as the treasurer of the Greater Oakland Republican Club. 

Timothy King, 56, of Ypsilanti: A plaintiff in a case against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. 

Michele Lundgren, 73, of Detroit: Ran for the 9th District seat in the state House of Representatives in 2022, but lost in the general election.

Meshawn Maddock, 55, of Milford: Former co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party and vocal proponent of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. She attended a pro-Trump event on Jan. 5, 2021, in Washington, D.C., the day before the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. She is the co-owner of A1 Bail Bonds, a bail bondsman company, along with her spouse, GOP state Rep. Matt Maddock.

James Renner, 76, of Lansing: Served as a precinct delegate in 2020 for Watertown Township.

Mayra Rodriguez, 64, of Grosse Pointe Farms: Ran for the 2nd District seat in the state House of Representatives in 2022 as a Republican, but lost to nowHouse Speaker Joe Tate (D-Detroit).

Six of the 16 GOP electors charged: (clockwise) Kent Vanderwood, Meshawn Maddock, Marian Sheridan, Kathy Berden, Stanley Grot and Clifford Frost

Rose Rook, 81, of Paw Paw, a former Van Buren County GOP chair who also served on the executive committee of the county party. 

Marian Sheridan, 69, of West Bloomfield: Co-founder of the Michigan Conservative Coalition, a right-wing group founded by the Maddocks. Sheridan was also a plaintiff in a case to decertify the 2020 election in Michigan.  

Ken Thompson, 68, of Orleans: An Ionia County Republican who served as a precinct delegate and as the chair of Ionia County Republican Party’s August convention in 2022.

Kent Vanderwood, 69, of Wyoming: Mayor of Wyoming and vice president of the Timothy Group, which advances Christian organizations. 

On Jan. 5, 2021, the National Archivist of the United States reportedly received the certificate casting votes for Trump and Pence. According to the affidavit, the return address on the envelope holding the document had “Kathleen Berden, Chair of the Michigan Republican Electoral College” listed as a return address. A copy of the document was sent to the Michigan Department of Attorney General. 

Investigators reviewed another document retained by the United States Senate Archives, where Berden was also listed as the return address. The Document was signed by 16 people identifying themselves as “the duly elected and qualified Electors for President and Vice President of the United States of America from Michigan.”

The investigators later confirmed that two envelopes had been mailed from the East Lansing Post Office on Dec. 15, 2020, with Berden’s name, address and title printed on the envelope.

The affidavit also said Michigan State Police Forensic Scientist Mckenzie Weyh confirmed Berden, Choate, Vanderwood, Frost, Henry, Rook, King and Renners’ signatures on the false certificate of votes. 

According to Shock, Lundgren reportedly confirmed she signed the document, and had signed it with Facchinello. 

In a tweet posted on Aug. 23, 2022, Lundgren said she “attested to nothing” posting a page filled with signatures from the accused electors alongside an image of certificate of votes for president and vice president from Michigan casting electoral votes for President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden in the 2008 election.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shock also cited multiple instances where Maddock and Sheridan admitted to casting their votes for Trump and Pence alongside the 14 other candidates for elector. 

The affidavit also notes that Grot allegedly told Detroit Free Press reporter M.L. Elrick that he had signed the document in support of Trump. Thompson also allegedly admitted to signing in an interview with Daily News reporter Elisabeth Waldon. 

In response to the charges, the Michigan Republican Party issued an unsigned statement saying the charges “sparked valid concerns regarding the possible misuse of power” by Nessel’s office. It also accused Nessel of “defending systemic election corruption,” and seeking to deconstruct the influence of the Republican Party’s activists and leaders through fear of prosecution. 

The Michigan GOP is chaired by Kristina Karamo, a Republican former secretary of state candidate who rose to prominence for denying the results of the 2020 election Trump lost to Biden. Karamo also refused to concede her 2022 defeat to Benson, again making unproven allegations of voter fraud. 

Norman Eisen, executive chair of the States United Democracy Center, said that Nessel did the right thing in issuing charges. Eisen previously served as special counsel and special assistant to former President Barack Obama for ethics and government reform from 2009 through 2011.

“No one in Michigan should be able to forge election related documents with impunity,” Eisen said. “The [attorney general] and her office have often charged others who have created false and fraudulent documents, including Democrats.”

When election security is assaulted, the electoral system will respond, Eisen said. 

“Those who want to attack the election system in any way will have to think twice after [Attorney General] Nessel’s charges yesterday,” Eisen said.

Alongside Michigan, New Mexico, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are looking into groups who reportedly submitted false documents claiming Trump won the 2020 election.

Eisen said Nessel’s decision puts wind in the sails of other state law enforcement officials.

“Every state will have to look at its laws… but that’s OK. The [attorney general] has done her job here. And every state will learn from it and benefit from it and make their own decisions,” Eisen said.

“Others need to know in the future that they are not going to be able to forge election related documents or participate in conspiracies to overturn the lawful results in Michigan or as a part of, as here, a nationwide game,” he said.

After charges were announced, two West Michigan state representatives called on Vanderwood to step down from his responsibilities as mayor of Wyoming. 

“Among the Republicans accused of attempting to overturn the results of those free and fair elections is Wyoming Mayor Kent Vanderwood. I strongly believe that in light of these extremely serious allegations, the right thing for the mayor to do is resign,” said Rep. Phil Skaggs (D-East Grand Rapids) in a statement. 

Rep. John Fitzgerald (D-Wyoming) also issued a statement calling for Vanderwood to recuse himself from his duties until a verdict has been issued on the charges against him. 

“These allegations — attempting to overturn Michigan’s lawful election — not only demonstrate poor judgment, but they also describe actions that are un-American, dangerous and wholly inappropriate for any person in a position of public trust to perpetrate,” Fitzgerald said.

“Every resident of Wyoming deserves to have trust in our local institutions and leaders. While these charges move through the courts, I do not believe that our city, nor its residents, are best served under the leadership of an indicted mayor,” Fitzgerald said.

The city of Wyoming also issued a statement about the charges against Vanderwood. 

“We are aware of the charges against Kent Vanderwood. These actions did not take place in his capacity as a city official. With any charges, there is a legal process that needs to be followed.”

 

Vanderwood did not respond to requests for comment. Maddock, Grot, Sheridan and Lundgren also did not respond to requests to comment about the charges they were facing. 

In a report from FOX-2 in Detroit, Maddock responded to charges, denying any wrongdoing. 

“We didn’t do anything wrong. We know we didn’t do anything wrong. We’re not fake electors. I was a duly elected Trump elector. There was no forgery involved,” Maddock said.

Maddock and the other 15 individuals charged are scheduled to appear in District Court 54-A in Lansing on Thursday, Aug. 10 according to the court’s calendar. Nessel is listed as the prosecutor. 

Advance reporter Anna Liz Nichols contributed to this report. 

 

Kyle Davidson

Kyle Davidson covers state government alongside health care, business and the environment. A graduate of Michigan State University, Kyle studied journalism and political science. He previously covered community events, breaking news, state policy and the environment for outlets including the Lansing State Journal, the Detroit Free Press and Capital News Service.

 

Via Michigan Advance

 Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

 

In the years after the undisclosed trip to Alaska, Republican megadonor Paul Singer’s hedge fund has repeatedly had business before the Supreme Court. Alito has never recused himself.

By Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski | –

( ProPublica ) -In early July 2008, Samuel Alito stood on a riverbank in a remote corner of Alaska. The Supreme Court justice was on vacation at a luxury fishing lodge that charged more than $1,000 a day, and after catching a king salmon nearly the size of his leg, Alito posed for a picture. To his left, a man stood beaming: Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire who has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to rule in his favor in high-stakes business disputes.

Singer was more than a fellow angler. He flew Alito to Alaska on a private jet. If the justice chartered the plane himself, the cost could have exceeded $100,000 one way.

In the years that followed, Singer’s hedge fund came before the court at least 10 times in cases where his role was often covered by the legal press and mainstream media. In 2014, the court agreed to resolve a key issue in a decade-long battle between Singer’s hedge fund and the nation of Argentina. Alito did not recuse himself from the case and voted with the 7-1 majority in Singer’s favor. The hedge fund was ultimately paid $2.4 billion.

Alito did not report the 2008 fishing trip on his annual financial disclosures. By failing to disclose the private jet flight Singer provided, Alito appears to have violated a federal law that requires justices to disclose most gifts, according to ethics law experts.

Experts said they could not identify an instance of a justice ruling on a case after receiving an expensive gift paid for by one of the parties.

“If you were good friends, what were you doing ruling on his case?” said Charles Geyh, an Indiana University law professor and leading expert on recusals. “And if you weren’t good friends, what were you doing accepting this?” referring to the flight on the private jet.

Justices are almost entirely left to police themselves on ethical issues, with few restrictions on what gifts they can accept. When a potential conflict arises, the sole arbiter of whether a justice should step away from a case is the justice him or herself.

ProPublica’s investigation sheds new light on how luxury travel has given prominent political donors — including one who has had cases before the Supreme Court — intimate access to the most powerful judges in the country. Another wealthy businessman provided expensive vacations to two members of the high court, ProPublica found. On his Alaska trip, Alito stayed at a commercial fishing lodge owned by this businessman, who was also a major conservative donor. Three years before, that same businessman flew Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, on a private jet to Alaska and paid the bill for his stay.

Such trips would be unheard of for the vast majority of federal workers, who are generally barred from taking even modest gifts.

Leonard Leo, the longtime leader of the conservative Federalist Society, attended and helped organize the Alaska fishing vacation. Leo invited Singer to join, according to a person familiar with the trip, and asked Singer if he and Alito could fly on the billionaire’s jet. Leo had recently played an important role in the justice’s confirmation to the court. Singer and the lodge owner were both major donors to Leo’s political groups.

ProPublica’s examination of Alito’s and Scalia’s travel drew on trip planning emails, Alaska fishing licenses, and interviews with dozens of people including private jet pilots, fishing guides, former high-level employees of both Singer and the lodge owner, and other guests on the trips.

ProPublica sent Alito a list of detailed questions last week, and on Tuesday, the Supreme Court’s head spokeswoman told ProPublica that Alito would not be commenting. Several hours later, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Alito responding to ProPublica’s questions about the trip.

Alito said that when Singer’s companies came before the court, the justice was unaware of the billionaire’s connection to the cases. He said he recalled speaking to Singer on “no more than a handful of occasions,” and they never discussed Singer’s business or issues before the court.

Alito said that he was invited to fly on Singer’s plane shortly before the trip and that the seat “​​would have otherwise been vacant.” He defended his failure to report the trip to the public, writing that justices “commonly interpreted” the disclosure requirements to not include “accommodations and transportation for social events.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for Singer told ProPublica that Singer didn’t organize the trip and that he wasn’t aware Alito would be attending when he accepted the invitation. Singer “never discussed his business interests” with the justice, the spokesperson said, adding that at the time of trip, neither Singer nor his companies had “any pending matters before the Supreme Court, nor could Mr. Singer have anticipated in 2008 that a subsequent matter would arise that would merit Supreme Court review.”

Leo did not respond to questions about his organizing the trip but said in a statement that he “would never presume to tell” Alito and Scalia “what to do.”

This spring, ProPublica reported that Justice Clarence Thomas received decades of luxury travel from another Republican megadonor, Dallas real estate magnate Harlan Crow. In a statement, Thomas defended the undisclosed trips, saying unnamed colleagues advised him that he didn’t need to report such gifts to the public. Crow also gave Thomas money in an undisclosed real estate deal and paid private school tuition for his grandnephew, who Thomas was raising as a son. Thomas reported neither transaction on his disclosure forms.

The undisclosed gifts have prompted lawmakers to launch investigations and call for ethics reform. Recent bills would impose tighter rules for justices’ recusals, require the Supreme Court to adopt a binding code of conduct and create an ethics body, which would investigate complaints. Neither a code nor an ethics office currently exists.

“We wouldn’t tolerate this from a city council member or an alderman,” Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said of Thomas in a recent hearing. “And yet the Supreme Court won’t even acknowledge it’s a problem.”

So far, the court has chafed at the prospect of such reforms. Though the court recently laid out its ethics practices in a statement signed by all nine justices, Chief Justice John Roberts has not directly addressed the recent revelations. In fact, he has repeatedly suggested Congress might not have the power to regulate the court at all.

“We Take Good Care of Him Because He Makes All the Rules”

In the 1960s in his first year at Harvard Law School, Singer was listening to a lecture by a famed liberal professor when, he later recalled, he had an epiphany: “My goodness. They’re making it up as they go along.”

It was a common sentiment among conservative lawyers, who often accuse liberal judges of activist overreach. While Singer’s career as an attorney was short-lived, his convictions about the law stayed with him for decades. After starting a hedge fund that eventually made him one of the richest people in the country, he began directing huge sums to causes on the right. That included groups, like the Federalist Society, dedicated to fostering the conservative legal movement and putting its followers on the bench.

In the last decade, Singer has contributed over $80 million to Republican political groups. He has also given millions to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank where he has served as chairman since 2008. The institute regularly files friend-of-the-court briefs with the Supreme Court — at least 15 this term, including one asking the court to block student loan relief.

Singer’s interest in the courts is more than ideological. His hedge fund, Elliott Management, is best known for making investments that promise handsome returns but could require bruising legal battles. Singer has said he’s drawn to positions where you “control your own destiny, not just riding up and down with the waves of financial markets.” That can mean pressuring corporate boards to fire a CEO, brawling with creditors over the remains of a bankrupt company and suing opponents.

The fund now manages more than $50 billion in assets. “The investments are extremely shrewdly litigation-driven,” a person familiar with Singer’s fund told ProPublica. “That’s why he’s a billionaire.”

Singer’s most famous gamble eventually made its way to the Supreme Court.

In 2001, Argentina was in a devastating economic depression. Unemployment skyrocketed and deadly riots broke out in the street. The day after Christmas, the government finally went into default. For Singer, the crisis was an opportunity. As other investors fled, his fund purchased Argentine government debt at a steep discount.

Within several years, as the Argentine economy recovered, most creditors settled with the government and accepted a fraction of what the debt was originally worth. But Singer’s fund, an arm of Elliott called NML Capital, held out. Soon, they were at war: a midtown Manhattan-based hedge fund trying to impose its will on a sovereign nation thousands of miles away.

The fight played out on familiar turf for Singer: the U.S. courts. He launched an aggressive legal campaign to force Argentina to pay in full, and his personal involvement in the case attracted widespread media attention. Over 13 years of litigation, the arguments spanned what rights foreign governments have in the U.S. and whether Argentina could pay off debts to others before Singer settled his claim.

If Singer succeeded, he stood to make a fortune.

In 2007, for the first but not the last time, Singer’s fund asked the Supreme Court to intervene. A lower court had stopped Singer and another fund from seizing Argentine central bank funds held in the U.S. The investors appealed, but that October, the Supreme Court declined to take up the case.

On July 8 of the following year, Singer took Alito to Alaska on the private jet, according to emails, flight data from the Federal Aviation Administration and people familiar with the trip.

The group flew across the country to the town of King Salmon on the Alaska peninsula. They returned to the East Coast three days later.

In Alaska, they stayed at the King Salmon Lodge, a luxury fishing resort that drew celebrities, wealthy businessmen and sports stars. On July 9, one of the lodge’s pilots flew Alito and other guests around 70 miles to the west to fish the Nushagak River, known for one of the best salmon runs in the world. Snapshots from the trip show Alito in waders and an Indianapolis Grand Prix hat, smiling broadly as he holds his catch.

“Sam Alito is in the red jacket there,” one lodge worker said, as he narrated an amateur video of the justice on the water. “We take good care of him because he makes all the rules.”

Other guests on the trip included Leo, the Federalist Society leader, and Judge A. Raymond Randolph, a prominent conservative appellate judge for whom Leo had clerked, according to fishing licenses and interviews with lodge staff.

On another day, the group flew on one of the lodge’s bush planes to a waterfall in Katmai National Park, where bears snatch salmon from the water with their teeth. At night, the lodge’s chefs served multicourse meals of Alaskan king crab legs or Kobe filet. On the last evening, a member of Alito’s group bragged that the wine they were drinking cost $1,000 a bottle, one of the lodge’s fishing guides told ProPublica.

In his op-ed, Alito described the lodge as a “comfortable but rustic facility.” The justice said he does not remember if he was served wine, but if he was, it didn’t cost $1,000 a bottle. (Alito also pointed readers to the lodge’s website. The lodge has been sold since 2008 and is now a more downscale accommodation.)

The justice’s stay was provided free of charge by another major donor to the conservative legal movement: Robin Arkley II, the owner of a mortgage company then based in California. Arkley had recently acquired the fishing lodge, which catered to affluent tourists seeking a luxury experience in the Alaskan wilderness. A planning document prepared by lodge staff describes Alito as a guest of Arkley. Another guest on the trip told ProPublica the trip was a gift from Arkley, and two lodge employees said they were told that Alito wasn’t paying.

Arkley, who does not appear to have been involved in any cases before the court, did not respond to detailed questions for this story.

Alito did not disclose the flight or the stay at the fishing lodge in his annual financial disclosures. A federal law passed after Watergate requires federal officials including Supreme Court justices to publicly report most gifts. (The year before, Alito reported getting $500 of Italian food and wine from a friend, noting that his friend was unlikely to “appear before this Court.”)

The law has a “personal hospitality” exemption: If someone hosts a justice on their own property, free “food, lodging, or entertainment” don’t always have to be disclosed. But the law clearly requires disclosure for gifts of private jet flights, according to seven ethics law experts, and Alito appears to have violated it. The typical interpretation of the law required disclosure for his stay at the lodge too, experts said, since it was a commercial property rather than a vacation home. The judiciary’s regulations did not make that explicit until they were updated earlier this year.

In his op-ed, Alito said that justices “commonly interpreted” the law’s exception for hospitality “to mean that accommodations and transportation for social events were not reportable gifts.”

His op-ed pointed to language in the judiciary’s filing instructions and cited definitions from Black’s Law Dictionary and Webster’s. But he did not make reference to the judiciary’s regulations or the law itself, which experts said both clearly required disclosure for gifts of travel. ProPublica found at least six examples of other federal judges disclosing gifts of private jet travel in recent years.

“The exception only covers food, lodging and entertainment,” said Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer now at the watchdog group CREW. “He’s trying to move away from the plain language of the statute and the regulation.”

The Alaska vacation was the first time Singer and Alito met, according to a person familiar with the trip. After the trip, the two appeared together at public events. When Alito spoke at the annual dinner of the Federalist Society lawyers convention the following year, the billionaire introduced him. The justice told a story about having an encounter with bears during a fishing trip with Singer, according to the legal blog Above the Law. He recalled asking himself: “Do you really want to go down in history as the first Supreme Court justice to be devoured by a bear?”

The year after that, in 2010, Alito delivered the keynote speech at a dinner for donors to the Manhattan Institute. Once again, Singer delivered a flattering introduction. “He and his small band of like-minded justices are a critical and much-appreciated bulwark of our freedom,” Singer told the crowd. “Samuel Alito is a model Supreme Court justice.”

Meanwhile, Singer and Argentina kept asking the Supreme Court to intervene in their legal fight. His fund enlisted Ted Olson, the famed appellate lawyer who represented George W. Bush in the Bush v. Gore case during the 2000 presidential election.

In January 2010, a year and a half after the Alaska vacation, the fund once again asked the high court to take up an aspect of the dispute. The court declined. In total, parties asked the court to hear appeals in the litigation eight times in the six years after the trip. In most instances, it was Singer’s adversaries filing an appeal, with Singer’s fund successfully arguing for the justices to decline the case and let stand a lower court ruling.

The Supreme Court hears a tiny portion of the many cases it’s asked to rule on each year. Under the court’s rules, cases are only accepted when at least four of the nine justices vote to take it up. The deliberations on whether to take a case are shrouded in secrecy and happen at meetings attended only by the justices. These decisions are a fundamental way the court wields power. The justices’ votes are not typically made public, so it is unclear how Alito voted on the petitions involving Singer.

As Singer’s battle with Argentina intensified, his hedge fund launched an expansive public relations and lobbying campaign. In 2012, the hedge fund even attempted to seize an Argentine navy ship docked in Ghana to secure payment from the country. (The effort was thwarted by a ruling from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.) Argentina’s president labeled Singer and his fellow investors “vultures” attempting extortion; Singer complained the country was scapegoating him.

In 2014, the Supreme Court finally agreed to hear a case on the matter. It centered on an important issue: how much protection Argentina could claim as a sovereign nation against the hedge fund’s legal maneuvers in U.S. courts. The U.S. government filed a brief on Argentina’s side, warning that the case raised “extraordinarily sensitive foreign policy concerns.”

The case featured an unusual intervention by the Judicial Crisis Network, a group affiliated with Leo known for spending millions on judicial confirmation fights. The group filed a brief supporting Singer, which appears to be the only Supreme Court friend-of-the-court brief in the organization’s history.

The court ruled in Singer’s favor 7-1 with Alito joining the majority. The justice did not recuse himself from the case or from any of the other petitions involving Singer.

“The tide turned” thanks to that “decisive” ruling and another from the court, as Singer’s law firm described it. After the legal setbacks and the election of a new president in Argentina, the country finally capitulated in 2016. Singer’s fund walked away with a $2.4 billion payout, a spectacular return.

Abbe Smith, a law professor at Georgetown who co-wrote a textbook on legal and judicial ethics, said that Alito should have recused himself. If she were representing a client and learned the judge had taken a gift from the party on the other side, Smith said, she would immediately move for recusal. “If I found out after the fact, I’d be outraged on behalf of my client,” she said. “And, frankly, I’d be outraged on behalf of the legal system.”

The law that governs when justices must recuse themselves from a case sets a high but subjective standard. It requires justices to withdraw from any case when their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” But the court allows individual justices to interpret that requirement for themselves. Historically, they’ve almost never explained why they are or are not recusing themselves, and unlike lower court judges, their decisions cannot be appealed.

Alito articulated his own standard during his Senate confirmation process, writing that he believed in stepping away from cases when “any possible question might arise.”

In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Alito wrote of his failure to recuse himself from Singer’s cases at the court: “It was and is my judgment that these facts would not cause a reasonable and unbiased person to doubt my ability to decide the matters in question impartially.”

Critics have long assailed the Supreme Court’s practices on this issue as both opaque and inconsistent. “The idea ‘just trust us to do the right thing’ while remaining in total secrecy is unworkable,” said Amanda Frost, a judicial ethics expert at the University of Virginia School of Law.

For Singer, appeals to the Supreme Court are an almost unavoidable result of his business model. Since the Argentina case, Singer’s funds were named parties in at least two other cases that were appealed to the court, both stemming from battles with Fortune 500 companies. One of the petitions is currently pending.

Grey Goose and Glacier Ice

The month after Singer got home from the 2008 fishing trip, he realized he had a problem. He was supposed to receive a shipment of frozen salmon from the Alaska lodge. But the fish hadn’t arrived. So the billionaire emailed an unlikely person to get to the bottom of it: Leo, the powerful Federalist Society executive.

“They’ve escaped!!” Singer wrote. Leo then sent an email to Arkley, the lodge owner, to track down the missing seafood.

The only clear thread connecting the prominent guests on the trip is that they all had a relationship with Leo. Leo is now a giant in judicial politics who helped handpick Donald Trump’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees and recently received a $1.6 billion donation to further his political interests. Leo’s network of political groups was in its early days, however, when he traveled with Alito to Alaska. It had run an advertising campaign supporting Alito in his confirmation fight, and Leo was reportedly part of the team that prepared Alito for his Senate hearings.

Singer and Arkley, the businessmen who provided the trip to the justice, were both significant donors to Leo’s groups at the time, according to public records and reporting by The Daily Beast. Arkley also sometimes provided Leo with one of his private planes to travel to business meetings, according to a former pilot of Arkley’s.

In his statement, Leo did not address detailed questions about the trip, but he said “no objective and well-informed observer of the judiciary honestly could believe that they decide cases in order to cull favor with friends, or in return for a free plane seat or fishing trip.”

He added that the public should wonder whether ProPublica’s coverage is “bait for reeling in more dark money from woke billionaires who want to damage this Supreme Court and remake it into one that will disregard the law by rubber stamping their disordered and highly unpopular cultural preferences.”

Arkley is a fixture in local politics in his hometown of Eureka, California, known for lashing out at city officials and for once starting his own newspaper reportedly out of disdain for the local press. By the early 2000s, he’d made a fortune buying and servicing distressed mortgages and also become a significant donor in national GOP politics.

As his political profile rose, Arkley bragged to friends that he’d gotten to know one-third of the sitting Supreme Court justices. He told friends he had a relationship with Clarence Thomas, according to two people who were close with Arkley. And the Alito trip was not Arkley’s first time covering a Supreme Court justice’s travel to Alaska.

In June 2005, Arkley flew Scalia on his private jet to Kodiak Island, Alaska, two of Arkley’s former pilots told ProPublica. Arkley had paid to rent out a remote fishing lodge that cost $3,200 a week per person, according to the lodge’s owner, Martha Sikes.

Snapshots from the trip, found in the justice’s papers at Harvard Law School, capture Scalia knee-deep in a river as he fights to reel in a fish. Randolph, the appellate judge who was also on the later trip, joined Scalia and Arkley on the vacation, flying on the businessman’s jet.

Scalia did not report the trip on his annual filing, another apparent violation of the law, according to ethics law experts. Scalia’s travels briefly drew scrutiny in 2016 after he died while staying at the hunting ranch of a Texas businessman. Scalia had a pattern of disclosing trips to deliver lectures while not mentioning hunting excursions he took to nearby locales hosted by local attorneys and businessmen, according to a research paper published after his death.

Randolph, now a senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, did not disclose the trip. (Nor did he disclose the later trip with Alito.) Randolph told ProPublica that when he was preparing his form for 2005, he called the judiciary’s financial disclosure office to ask about disclosing the trip. He shared his notes from the call with a staffer, which say “don’t have to report trip to Alaska with Rob Arkley & others / private jet / lodge.” Kathleen Clark, an ethics law expert at Washington University in St. Louis, said, “I don’t understand how the staff member came to that conclusion based on the language in the statute.”

On June 9, Arkley’s group chartered a boat, the Happy Hooker IV, to tour Yakutat Bay. On the way over, Scalia and Arkley discussed whether Senate Republicans, then in a contentious fight over judicial confirmations, should abolish the filibuster to move forward, according to a person traveling with them.

A photo captures Arkley and Scalia later that day gazing off the side of the boat at the famed Hubbard Glacier. At one point, a guide chiseled chunks off an iceberg and passed them to Scalia. The justice then mixed martinis from Grey Goose vodka and glacier ice.

It remains unclear how Scalia ended up in Alaska with Arkley. But the justice’s archives at Harvard Law School offer a tantalizing clue. Immediately before the fishing trip, Scalia gave a speech for the Federalist Society in Napa, California. The next day, Arkley’s plane flew from Napa to Alaska. Scalia’s papers contain a folder labeled “Federalist Society, Napa and Alaska, 2005 June 3-10,” suggesting a possible connection between the conservative organization and the fishing trip.

The contents of that folder are currently sealed, however. They will be opened to the public in 2036.

In my view some of the actions Trump took while president were much, much worse than storing some old files in his bathroom. The government over-classifies things and the 1917 Espionage Act, which underpins some of the charges against him, is unconstitutional and should be struck down. Maybe if the Republicans are angered enough by its use against their party’s leader they can be proper libertarians and get rid of the damn thing.

So here are three things Trump did, which immediately come to mind, that should have been crimes that landed him in jail.

1. Trump initiated a formal policy of family separation of undocumented immigrants to the United States. He didn’t change the law, just the way Homeland Security and other agencies viewed the law. It is not intrinsically illegal for people to enter the US without a visa, if, for instance, they are seeking asylum. You can’t really tell the status of their case until they go before a judge. So up until 2017 they weren’t considered criminals. But Trump encouraged law enforcement to disregard asylum claims and to view them as having broken the law for just having stepped foot in the US. If they were criminals they had to be jailed. And children cannot be held in a jail for adults. So the practical outcome of treating the parents as criminals was that their children would be taken from them by child services and placed in juvenile detention or even in foster homes.

The policy had no other rationale but cruelty. Then White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, part of Trump’s psychopathocracy, openly boasted about sending a message in this way to immigrant families not to come with their children. There is no, repeat, no evidence that the family separations slowed immigration. The practice did, however, resemble the actions of slavers in the America of the 19th century who separated enslaved families and sold family members down the river. Some of the children taken away were US-born. The government lost track of others. Some children were abused.

Anybody who did a thing like that should go to jail for life. But it wasn’t even illegal, and although 66% of Americans disapproved, 27% thought it was the right thing to do.

2. Muslim Ban. Trump tried three times to come up with regulatory language that would allow him to ban some Muslims from coming to the United States. Discriminating against people on the basis of religion is un-American. Because he finally tied the ban to countries that would not or could not conform to US reporting requirements on would-be immigrants, he finally made it stick. Most of the big Muslim countries, like Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh and Indonesia were not even affected. He managed to make life more difficult for Yemeni-Americans who could not see their grandparents anymore, or for desperate Syrians trying to flee their civil war. As with family separation, the cruelty was the point.

3. Trump’s deployment of force against peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters at LaFayette Square in June 2020 was illegal and unconstitutional. His attempt to order in military forces contravened posse comitatus.

Scott Michelman of the ACLU observed, “The President’s shameless, unconstitutional, unprovoked, and frankly criminal attack on protesters because he disagreed with their views shakes the foundation of our nation’s constitutional order. And when the nation’s top law enforcement officer becomes complicit in the tactics of an autocrat, it chills protected speech for all of us.”

Also illegal was his use of federal agents to kidnap protesters in Portland, Oregon, off the streets without due process.

Of course these three lawless actions that harmed large numbers of innocent people are only a drop in the bucket among the innumerable unethical, illegal, unconstitutional or just plain ugly things Trump did to our country. If he goes to jail for stupidly fooling around with some old Pentagon war plans, that will be ironic, since it is probably the least damaging of his crimes.