A NON-NUCLEAR NUCLEAR EXPLOSION

As if all the other news of this past week wasn’t enough, last night an event occurred that has never happened before in the history of the United States.

A Congressional Committee asserted in court that the committee possessed evidence sufficient to conclude that a President of the United States had committed one of the most egregious felonies imaginable, while in office.

Quoting from the court filing:

“[E]vidence and information available to the Committee established a good-faith belief that Mr. Trump and others may have engaged in criminal and/or fraudulent acts, and that [Eastman’s] legal assistance was used in furtherance of those activities.”

“The President and [Eastman] engaged in an extensive public and private campaign to convince the Vice President to reject certain Biden electors or delay the proceedings, without basis, so that the President and his associates would have additional time to manipulate the results. Had this effort succeeded, the electoral count would have been obstructed, impeded, influenced, and (at the very least) delayed, all without any genuine legal justification and based on the false pretense that the election had been stolen. There is no genuine question that the President and Plaintiff attempted to accomplish this specific illegal result.”

“The Select Committee also has a good-faith basis for concluding that the President and members of his Campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States in violation” of federal law.

“The evidence supports an inference that President Trump and members of his campaign knew he had not won enough legitimate state electoral votes to be declared the winner of the 2020 Presidential election during the January 6 Joint Session of Congress, but the President nevertheless sought to use the Vice President to manipulate the results in his favor…Thus, even if the Vice President had authority to reject certified electoral certificates (and he did not), there was no valid lawful basis to do so.”

“The evidence supports an inference that President Trump, [Eastman], and several others entered into an agreement to defraud the United States by interfering with the election certification process, disseminating false information about election fraud, and pressuring state officials to alter state election results and federal officials to assist in that effort.”

Congress didn’t even say such things about Richard Nixon.

This latest declaration by the select committee will be broadly attacked by Trump’s allies inside the Republican Party. The implications here for both the midterms and 2024 are just too big for there not to be a major pushback by the Trump camp.

In fact, Trump fired back this morning with a lengthy statement attacking the committee’s filing and repeating many of his false claim of election fraud.

“The Unselect Committee’s sole goal is to try to prevent President Trump, who is leading by large margins in every poll, from running again for president, if I so choose. By so doing they are destroying democracy as we know it. Their lies and Marxist tactics against political opponents will not stop the truth, or the biggest political movement, Make America Great Again/America First, in the history of our Country.”

George Conway, said today on “Morning Joe” that the DOJ must now go straight at Trump with an indictment in hand.

“This statute says what it says, but the problem for Trump and Eastman and others, and Eastman has had to plead the Fifth 146 times at his deposition before the Jan. 6 committee. The problem for them is that the ‘evidence is piling up and mounting and it fits these statutes like a glove. I mean, the real issue is were they intending to deceive anybody, did they know they were deceiving people? There is already, you know, reporting out there that Trump was telling his aides, and I know for a fact this to be true, that he was saying, ‘How could I have lost to this guy? How could I have lost?’ which means he knew he lost, which means he knew he was engaging in fraud and knew he was engaging in a deceit, and the fact he was trying to obstruct the lawful function of the United States government puts this squarely, squarely under the scope of 18 U.S.C. section 371.”

The problem is that a prosecutor cannot be forced to prosecute anyone. At the DOJ level, only president Biden could really do anything and it is 100% against tradition for a president to order his attorney general to prosecute someone, let alone his primary political rival.

Biden could fire Merrick Garland, but then he’d be asked why. He could tell the truth, but then - again - one runs right up against the perfect counter-argument, led by the man who would burn the United States to the ground in order to save himself. Presidents don’t call for specific prosecutions.

There is always hope there is an investigation going on just beneath the surface. But gven that no one has heard about search warrants and indictments of low-level staffers, it’s safe to conclude that is not happening.

Trump has been playing footsie with running for re-election, with the major reason why he has not already made the announcement being the strict fund-raising controls he would be subject to. His political campaigning is now his major source of income as he sells tchochkes to the rubes at his website store; currently he is supposedly sitting on north of $100 million raised for politics that he can tap for his personal needs. His need for money may ultimately not be as important as his need for the legal invulnerability he would receive by declaring. In that case, the Department of Justice would find itself stymied as the institutionalists there follow the rule that the department should not bring legal actions “during a political campaign.”

There is an old adage that has become an old adage because it’s true: “When you strike the king, you must kill him.” What that means here is, the case needs to be “tighter than air-tight.” The possibility of Trump summoning the political disorder he promised at a recent rally when he told his followers to go into the streets with “the biggest demonstrations” should he be arrested does undoubtedly weigh heavily, along with the possibility of jury nullification if only one Trump diehard ended up on the jury and refused to vote for conviction despite the evidence.

At some point, someone is going to have to take the steps the facts call out for. The alternative is the election of a man who would literally destroy the constitutional democratic republic that has existed for 233 years.

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