Indict the Biden Crime Family - Not Donald Trump

An Important History Lesson

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To understand history is to understand just how outrageous the latest indictment of Donald Trump is.  Biden’s uber-partisan and ultra-weaponized DOJ  asserts Trump committed fraud for using the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to object to a stolen 2020 election.  In fact, the Act was created EXACTLY for such purpose.

In the 1886 presidential election, Democrat Sam Tilden won the popular vote against Republican Rutherford Hayes.  However, Tilden was one shy of the 185 electoral votes needed to beat Hayes even as evidence surfaced of fraud and intimidation of Republican voters in several key battleground states.   Sound familiar?

Because the Constitution didn’t provide clear guidelines on resolving the dispute, Congress set up a bipartisan Electoral Commission.  Voting along party lines, the Commission then handed the election to Hayes after ruling that 20 electoral votes in four contested states would go to Hayes.

To ensure such a bitter dispute wouldn’t repeat, Congress passed the 1887 Act.  It gave states the power to certify their electoral votes; and, most relevant to Trump’s phony indictment, set up a procedure allowing for objections.   

If at least one House member and Senator objected to a state’s vote, the House and Senate would separately debate the objection for up to two hours and then vote on it.  If no candidate received a majority of electoral votes, the election would be decided by the House of Representatives, with each state delegation having one vote.

Now here is why understanding this history is so important.  Since passage of the Electoral Count Act of 1887, both Democrats and Republicans have frequently used the Act to legally object to election results.

In fact, since the 1968 election, the Act has been used to dispute results in more than a third of the fourteen elections that have been held.  And here’s the buried and beautifully ironic lead: It has been the Democrats, not Republicans, who have more frequently used the 1887 Act.

The partisan poster child here is the 2016 Clinton v. Trump election.  Democrat House members Jamie Raskin, James Clyburn, and five others invoked the 1887 Act to try to derail Trump’s lawful election. 

Raskin and Clyburn would go on to push two phony impeachments of Trump; and they would later serve on the partisan witch hunt otherwise known as the J6 Committee now being used as a cudgel in the Trump indictment process. 

To my knowledge, neither of these partisans have ever been indicted for election interference for their use of the 1887 Act.  Nor have Raskin and Clyburn – along with other election interferers like Adam “Liar to Congress” Schiff – ever been indicted for their abuse of the indictment process or their scurrilous roles in the Russia Hoax.

Americans now fully understand this: The sole purpose of indicting Trump is to prevent him from becoming president again.  And here’s the real history lesson “tell” in the Biden DOJ’s election interference con game. 

On December 23, 2022, in a lame duck session, Congressional Democrats, in coalition with nine RINO House members, voted to amend the 1887 Act.  Moreover, these cowards did not do so in a standalone bill but rather by burying the amendment in a massive pork barrel spending package. 

The most important revision was to designate the vice president’s role in the Electoral College count as “ceremonial.”  This change was a quite startling tacit admission that Vice President Mike Pence as President of the Senate, on January 6, 2021, had indeed had the discretion to do what many members of Congress along with President Trump wanted Pence to do that fateful day:

Send the issue back to the states to investigate well-documented instances of fraud based on the objections raised before Pence by a large number of Congressmen spearheaded by Representative Andy Biggs and Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley.

Of course, Pence refused to exercise that discretion on January 6.  Astonishingly, as the public record indicates, Pence’s refusal was based on a legal opinion of his own counsel rather than one issued (or vetted) by Trump’s White House Legal Counsel. 

Here, President Trump was within his legal rights to expect his own vice president to follow White House procedures in reviewing legal matters.  Instead, Pence went rogue, thereby foreclosing any opportunity to investigate fraud and get a legal count of the votes quite legally under the 1887 Act.

The final pillar of sand the Trump indictment is built on is the dubious claim Trump knew the election was fair but still cried foul.  Here, we don’t need a legal scholar like Jonathan Turley to tell us that if some folks around Trump told him the election was fair and others told him it was rigged, that doesn’t prove Trump believed it was rigged.  It just proves, as is his public reputation, that Donald Trump comes to his own conclusions by listening to a broad array of voices.

The bottom backfiring line: Trump gets another fake indictment, the Biden crime family goes uninvestigated, the American people lose more faith in our judicial system, and Trump rises further in the polls.