The Democratic Party’s war against Trump via the Department of Justice persists.
Special counsel Jack Smith, appointed by Biden’s Department of Justice, dismissed the indictment that many on the left had hoped for. There were a total of four offenses, and they all related to the alleged attempts to rig the January 6 election.
In terms of prospective legal consequences, the first count, “conspiracy to defraud the United States or an agency thereof,” remains the gravest. This has a lot to do with the courtroom in which this case is being heard and the assigned judge. The majority of Washington, D.C. jurors are Democrats, and it is evident that Judge Tanya Chutkan is committed to harshly punishing anyone who is even remotely associated with January 6.
The first count involves “co-conspirators” who are not formally identified in the indictment. Since we know the identities of five of them, we can speculate on what the DOJ’s primary argument will be.
The Washington Post, which leans to the left, determined the identities of the five unnamed co-conspirators by analyzing the details of each unnamed co-conspirator enumerated in the indictment.
Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jeff Clark, and Kenneth Chesebro, according to The Post, are the five.
The indictment itself states that:
8. The Defendant [Trump] enlisted co-conspirators to assist him in his criminal efforts to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election and retain power. Among these were:
a. Co-Conspirator 1, an attorney who was willing to spread knowingly false claims and pursue strategies that the Defendant’s 2020 re-election campaign attorneys would not.
b. Co-Conspirator 2, an attorney who devised and attempted to implement a strategy to leverage the Vice President’s ceremonial role overseeing the certification proceeding to obstruct the certification of the presidential election.
c. Co-Conspirator 3, an attorney whose unfounded claims of election fraud the Defendant privately acknowledged to others sounded “crazy.” Nonetheless, the Defendant embraced and publicly amplified Co-Conspirator 3’s disinformation.
d. Co-Conspirator 4, a Justice Department official who worked on civil matters and who, with the Defendant, attempted to use the Justice Department to open sham election crime investigations and influence state legislatures with knowingly false claims of election fraud.
e. Co-Conspirator 5, an attorney who assisted in devising and attempting to implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding.
f. Co-Conspirator 6, a political consultant who helped implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding.
Five of the six were allocated names by The Washington Post. Many are familiar to conservatives, particularly those of us who were working on campaigns and in Washington, DC on January 6.
1. Rudy Giuliani
“A former federal prosecutor and celebrated New York mayor who was regarded as a national hero in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Giuliani spearheaded bogus legal challenges in key battleground states, including Michigan and Georgia, promoting unsupported claims of vast election fraud. He continued to do so even as many state and federal officials — including William P. Barr, Trump’s own attorney general — disputed those claims,” the outlet reports.
Among other things, the indictment says that Trump turned to this co-conspirator to echo false claims of election fraud when his own advisers told him that he had lost the vote count and that both knew they were making false claims as they sought to “impair, obstruct and defeat” the 2020 election results, including by putting pressure on Republican lawmakers in key battleground states.
2. John Eastman
“Eastman, a conservative attorney who once clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, crafted a legal strategy that involved creating slates of pro-Trump electors in states that Joe Biden won. He also falsely asserted, without evidence, that Trump lost Georgia in part because 66,000 underage people and 2,500 convicted felons had voted in the state that year,” The Post alleges.
3. Sidney Powell
According to the Post, “Powell came to the Republican National Committee after the 2020 election with the baseless claim that voting machines had been hacked to rig the election for Biden. After she aired those falsehoods at a poorly received news conference, the Trump campaign distanced itself from her. But she kept filing lawsuits claiming election fraud and airing those allegations on Fox News.”
4. Jeffrey Clark
“Clark was a mid-level Justice Department official friendly to Trump’s views on the election — so much so that Trump considered installing him as acting attorney general. Clark proposed sending a letter to officials in key states that said the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns” about the vote and that the states should consider sending “a separate slate of electors supporting Donald J. Trump” for Congress to approve, according to hearing testimony from the House Jan. 6 Committee,” the Post reports.
“Clark’s actions led to a dramatic confrontation at the White House on Jan. 3, 2021 — detailed in Tuesday’s indictment — when senior Justice Department officials told Trump they would resign — and many other senior officials would also quit — if the president appointed Clark in place of acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen,” the outlet added.
5. Kenneth Chesebro
“An appellate attorney who had studied under and worked with Harvard Law professor Lawrence Tribe, Chesebro was the first to suggest that slates of pro-Trump electors could organize in states that he lost and be recognized by Congress on Jan. 6. He first shared the strategy with a friend representing the Trump campaign in Wisconsin before connecting with Eastman, Giuliani and Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn to coordinate across six more swing states,” WaPo concluded.
More on this story via The Republic Brief:
The Post was unable to determine who the 6th “co-conspirator” is. CONTINUE READING…
