It’s easy to think that the latest Trump indictment in Georgia is more of the same – 33 more charges to add to his existing 78 – and that people have grown numb to all of this.
But the Georgia charges are significantly different in several ways.
Trump won’t be able to pardon his way out of any conviction (even the Georgia governor can’t pardon someone convicted in these circumstances, along a board can do it after the detainee has spent at least five years in jail), he’s charged with 18 other defendants, it’s a sprawling case involving conspiracy and racketeering, he’ll probably be mugshotted, the trial will be televised etc etc.
Bloomberg (register to read) examines the five significant ways that “Georgia is different”, including this:
Testimony From Victims – The indictment tells a gripping tale about the impact of election-fraud claims by Trump allies on ordinary people. State lawmakers heard testimony in December 2020 from Giuliani, who claimed to have “ample evidence” the election was stolen, 10,000 dead people voted, and election workers counted a suitcase of illegal ballots. He said two poll workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, passed USB drives as if they were “vials of heroin or cocaine.” The women were passing a ginger mint, investigators later determined in debunking the claims.
* Paul Walter is a Liberal Democrat activist and member of the Liberal Democrat Voice team. He blogs at Liberal Burblings.
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7 Comments
It is true that Trump could not pardon his way out of any state conviction, but the state Governor could. If Trump wins the Presidency next year, it is likely that Georgia will have voted Republican in the election and that a Republican candidate will have been elected Governor.
These are serious charges indeed and of International importance. American democracy at the grassroots level is admirable with elections for town and city sheriffs, treasurers etc. However, as you move up the pyramid of power it becomes increasingly corrupted by the financial power of big corporations and super pacs. There are something like 5 lobbyists for every congressman focused on the Financial services industry alone.
Universal suffrage, secret ballots and fair elections are the foundations of freedom of democracy.
All democratic politicians entering a position of power today should have read and absorbed the warnings from these five books.
– George Orwell’s 1984
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s – The Gulag Archipelago “The line between good and evil runs through the centre of every human heart”
– Wlliam L Shirer’s – The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
– Jun Chang and Jon Haliday’s- Mao:The Unknown Story
– Anne Applebaum’s – The Red Famine. There is a moment in this book about the Holodomor in Ukraine, when a woman, out of sheer desperation, eats her deceased 7 year old daughter.
Mel, I have added a note above. The governor cannot pardon someone convicted in these circumstances. There is a pardon board that decides – and they can only pardon after the person has spent five years in jail. Those are the rules in Georgia.
@Paul Welter
I stand corrected and enlightened. Thanks.
Joe Bourke “American democracy at grassroots level is admirable with elections for town and city sheriffs, treasurers etc”
I disagree. Elections should be for elected representatives who in turn manage the executive. Local democracy in the UK has been systematically emasculated through increased central government control and the creation of police and crime commissioners.
Perish the thought that we should start trying to elect the council officers too!
I agree with Graham Jeffs.
There is no guarantee that candidates for election as a council officer etc. would be competent to do the job in question.
My perception of policing in the USA is that police forces can be very fragmented – especially given that they might refer to what we know as a village as a city and hence elect a police chief for a tiny community. Grossly inefficient and big waste of money.
The Georgia gubernatorial race was particularly controversial during the 2018 elections, as Republican candidate Brian Kemp was also the Georgia Secretary of State (in charge of the elections) leading to allegations of conflicts of interests. Despite calls from Georgia Democrats, organizations such as the NAACP and Common Cause and former president Jimmy Carter, Kemp did not relinquish the position until after the election.
Accusations were also leveled at Kemp with regards to the purging of voter rolls that was done under his oversight. Due to strict voting rules in Georgia, tens of thousands of citizens lost their right to vote because of otherwise trivial issues, such as small differences between pieces of identification or insufficiently similar signatures. Kemp was accused of using the voter roll purge as a tactic to disenfranchise more than half a million people, predominantly African-Americans, which has been likened to voter suppression.
Brad Raffensperger ran for the Secretary of State of Georgia in the 2018 state elections. The Secretary of State in Georgia oversees elections and is chairman of the state election board. It was Raffensperger who refused pressure from then-President Donald Trump to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in the state Brad Raffensperger. He won re-election as secretary of state in the 2022 election.
As an official directly elected (rather than appointed) to public office he had a mandate independent of the Republican controlled senate. That seemed to matter in the 2020 Presidential elections. Republicans had maintained effective control of the Georgia Senate with 38 of 56 members and won every statewide office in 2018.