Fake Electors Are Getting Charged for Attacking Democracy. So Is Donald Trump.

July 21, 2023 Off By Todd Zwillich

This content comes from the latest installment of our weekly Breaking the Vote newsletter out of VICE News’ D.C. bureau, tracking the ongoing efforts to undermine the democratic process in America. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday.

A Lansing blow

Donald Trump stands charged with 61 felonies. Trumpworld lawyers are facing fines, sanctions, and possible disbarment all over America for their roles in weaponizing the legal system in service of his attempted coup. MAGA acolytes are confronting trials and jail time for their own bit parts in the squalid story.

And yet only now, this week, has criminal accountability for the direct participants in Trump’s plot to steal the 2020 election finally arrived. As of this writing, no charges have been made public in the Special Counsel investigation of the attempt to overturn the 2020 vote. More witnesses are on the grand jury schedule.

But in Michigan, 16 fake electors now face eight felony charges apiece for conspiracy, forgery, and more. State Attorney General (and Breaking the Vote veteran) Dana Nessel hit the Internet with a video statement where she made clear she would be derelict if prosecutors “failed to act here in the face of overwhelming evidence of an organized effort to circumvent the lawfully cast ballots of millions of Michigan voters in a presidential election.”

That’s important, especially in light of reports that the target letter federal prosecutors sent Trump (on a Sunday!) put him on notice he’s likely to be charged with 18 USC 241…violating someone’s civil rights in the coup plot. Is that an election worker in, say, Georgia, whose life was threatened by Trump’s mob-stirring lies? Is it literally all voters who Trump tried to deprive of a duly-counted, legally-cast vote?

Don’t sleep on the fact that two Michigan GOP lawmakers went to the White House after Trump lost the Nov. 2020 election. Did Trump urge them to appoint alternate (false) electors? Did they take that message back to Michigan Republicans? Don’t know about you, but when the Trump indictment is unsealed I’m Ctrl-F’ing “Michigan” first and “Georgia” second.

Meanwhile, Fulton County DA Fani Willis is prepping her own case in Georgia, which could charge a sprawling anti-democratic criminal conspiracy with Trump at its head. Willis furnished 16 fake electors with target letters there, too. Some of them have immunity deals for their cooperation.

The watch on indictments there starts July 31, a week from Monday.

There are important democratic imperatives in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, and even in the pornstar-hush-money case in Manhattan. Trump has attacked prosecutors, and even gone after a judge and his family in New York. MAGA supporters in Congress keep bending their institutional power toward interfering in the prosecutions and avoiding accountability for Trump. That makes powering through unintimidated all the more vital.

But the conduct in neither of those cases goes to the heart of Trump’s attack on American elections (unless you think paying off porn actress Stormy Daniels so you can lie to voters before an election qualifies.) Prosecutors in Michigan are charging coup participants. Prosecutors in Georgia appear about to. In Arizona, they’re circling. Former GOP Gov. Doug Doucey, who Trump asked to overturn the election, is talking with the feds.

Trump wants to beat these cases to avoid jail. But he also wants to use them to return to the presidency and launch an authoritarian takeover of the federal government. (If you haven’t yet, please make sure you read the NYT in that link.) Just last night, he threatened violence, again, if he’s ever held accountable. From now until the 2024 election, we’re in the most critical moment in American democracy in 50 years.

Send your friends the targeted email that covers the target letters. Sign em up for Breaking the Vote!

District nein

Alabama Republicans are doing all they can to avoid creating a second Black-majority congressional district, no matter what the Supreme Court told them to do. SCOTUS ruled back in June that Alabama’s seven-seat congressional map, with only one Black-majority district, likely violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. It upheld a lower court ruling telling Alabama to draw a map where voting-age Black folks have a majority, or “something very close to it” in a second district.

This week the Republicans running the Alabama House came up with a new map that does not come very close to it. They’re proposing a new district that’s 42..4% Black. The Senate came in with an even lower bid at a new 38.3% Black district. Voting rights groups are vowing challenges. Maybe we’ll see if SCOTUS and appellate courts like being dared to enforce their rulings.

The summertime lose

The feds’ target letter (again, on a Sunday!) was just the first in a week of bad court thingies for Donald Trump. Judges everywhere are, to use a legal term of art, not having it. Let’s review:

- Fulton’s folly - The Georgia Supreme court unanimously rejected Trump’s motion to block DA Fani Willis from using the special purpose grand jury to bring evidence against him.

- O Kaplan, my Kaplan - US District Judge Lewis Kaplan rejected Trump’s motion for a new trial in the civil suit that led to a $5 million jury verdict in May for E. Jean Carroll. Kaplan’s scathing 59-page ruling made it clear that the jury’s finding that Trump sexually abused Carroll in a department store changing room was not “erroneous” or a “miscarriage of justice.”

The ruling could also be bad news for Trump’s countersuit against Carroll, where he claims she defamed him by claiming he raped her, when the jury found that his assault only amounted to sexual abuse. “The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” Kaplan wrote.

- Only in New York! - Trump’s 34-felony-count indictment for the Stormy Daniels hush money payments scandal will stay in New York City–with a New York City jury–and not move to federal court, according to a ruling by US District Judge Allen K. Hellerstein.

Interestingly, it’s the same reasoning DOJ recently used to abandon their defense of Trump in the other E. Jean Carroll defamation suit. “Trump has failed to show that the conduct charged by the Indictment is for or relating to any act performed by or for the President under color of the official acts of a President,” Hellerstein wrote. This is crucial: keeping the case in New York State instead of federal court means a future president Trump won’t be able to pardon himself if he’s convicted.

Rhodes agents

The DOJ thinks that judges are going too easy on Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and other recently-convicted militia members. But is Homeland Security taking them seriously enough? Oath Keepers membership data leaked last year suggested over 300 of them were current or former DHS employees. Now there’s concern that DHS doesn’t have the means to detect and deal with potential extremists working at DHS agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Secret Service.

Colorado me shocked - It’s been a minute since we checked in on disgraced former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who’s facing a seven-felony indictment for criminal impersonation, election tampering, identity theft, and more. Peters is now trying to delay her trial, currently scheduled for October. How truly Trumpian! Peters recently fired her lawyer and hired a pair of new ones. Those attorneys asked the judge for a continuance so they can get up to speed on all the charges.

"The liar knows that people know he's lying, and the people that are being lied to know that they're being lied to. That is political reality in 2023." - GOP Sen. Cynthia Lummis, on Donald Trump’s possible GOP nomination for president, despite dozens of charges.

Irony filings — There have been nearly 100,000 ballot or registration challenges in Georgia since Republicans passed new voting restrictions and election laws last year. And just six right-wing activists are responsible for 90% of them. They include Frank Schneider, a MAGA election conspiracy enthusiast and QAnon poster, who is responsible for more than 31,500 challenges to other voters’ status on registration rolls. The justification for the challenges is fair and clean voter rolls. The reality, of course, is massive administrative burden for county election offices and for voters the activists don’t like.

Gaetz pride — It wouldn’t be a week with House Republicans without an attempt to interfere in one of Donald Trump’s criminal investigations. We’ll soon see whether GOP’s can work their Hunter Biden narrative around to impeaching Merrick Garland. In the meantime, Rep. Matt Gaetz answered Trump’s call for help by announcing he’d introduce a bill to interfere with the Jack Smith probe into the former president’s involvement in the Jan.6 riot. So subtle!

Mockery docket — Failed Arizona governor candidate Kari Lake’s lawyers were ordered to pay $122,000 in sanctions for bringing frivolous election lawsuits. Three attorneys who represented Lake and former MAGA Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem have to share the fines and reimbursements for filing a lawsuit in bad faith. They include Alan Dershowitz, who argued he was only a consultant on the case. The lawyers are appealing.

That’s a stretch — A former Maryland National Guardsman was sentenced to seven years this week for helping lead the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. Christopher Alberts was convicted in April on nine felony counts for actions that included rushing police and carrying a concealed weapon on Capitol grounds.

What about bobble — This seems dumb, inevitable, and guaranteed to pay off.