Trump Indictment III: Free Speech and Fair Elections?

The latest indictment against former president Donald J. Trump, the third one, is not just consolidating the fact that the U.S. now has a two-tiered judicial system. Its architects, the Biden administration, which every passing day reminds us that it is a regime more than a government, are focusing their war on the American republic in the realm of free speech and fair elections. The pursuit of a one-party, pseudo-democratic, soft authoritarian model is unmistakable.

Through Special Counsel Jack Smith, Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ)-selected prosecutor, a Washington, D.C., federal grand jury (America’s most left-wing legal venue) charged Trump with four criminal counts relating to the 2020 presidential election on Tuesday, August 1. These are: (1) conspiracy to defraud the United States; (2) conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; (3) obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; and (4) conspiracy against the civil rights of Americans. They all relate to Trump’s challenges to the 2020 presidential election. These accusations are as dangerous to the underlying principles of a free society as they are absurd as far as legal theory goes.

The basis for the alleged acts of “fraud,” as per the accusers, is that when Trump said the election was stolen, he knew it was not. In other words, Biden’s DOJ claims that the former president was making statements that he knew were false. “These claims were false, and the defendant knew they were false,” reads part of the document, but “repeated and widely disseminated them anyway." Additionally, the accusation states, among other things, that Trump “spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won.” 

The thrust of the charges is contingent on the premise that Trump sincerely believed that he lost, fair and square. This is not provable, and with a high likelihood, it is an incorrect assumption. There is nothing that could honestly suggest that Trump did not and does not believe that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. The 45th president is not alone in questioning the results. The truth is that no single court in the U.S. tried a case where all the evidence—statistical, videographic, and witness testimonials—relating to the gross irregularities in certain pivotal districts was presented. The legal losses suffered by Trump, the Republican Party, and citizen advocacy groups that challenged the legitimacy of the process got their cases dismissed, annulled, or defeated based on technical or time-relevant matters of the issue. The full merits of the legitimacy challenges were never heard in an American court of law.

The truth is that we will never know, with certainty, who won the 2020 presidential election. Rigging an election is a form of theft, and there are many ways to achieve this. The role that the FBI and other intelligence agencies played, for example, in pressuring social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook to censor stories, such as the Hunter Biden scandals, on the false conspiracy theory that it was Russian disinformation, is election meddling. The FBI knew that the contents of the Biden laptop would adversely impact the Democratic candidate’s campaign on the eve of the election. As the landmark February 4, 2021, Time article written by Molly Ball made clear, there was indeed a conspiracy “cabal” composed of Big Tech oligarchs, corporate media elites, union bosses, and over 150 left-wing activist groups that colluded to defeat Trump using questionable methodologies.

Under the political rationale of the Covid pandemic, electoral laws were changed nine months before the 2020 election by state courts, executive, and bureaucratic bodies. State legislatures, the only entities authorized by the Constitution to engage in this activity, were sidestepped. These changes to the electoral process allowed wholesale mail-in balloting, relaxed standards such as signature verification, tolerated unattended ballot boxes and rearranged allowable timeframes to vote. It was to be expected that any election with all these major procedural alterations would produce impressive anomalies. It did.   

Additionally, there were disproportionate private funds that helped key Democratic voting enclaves, arguably evading spending limits set by federal campaign finance laws that favored the Biden ticket. The Center for Tech and Civic Life, a coalition of leftist nonprofits and other ONG's that are funded by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, dumped around $500 million into local election zones that Democrats needed to win. Since 2020, at least twenty-four states have banned this type of involvement of private money in publicly funded elections.

The 2020 election was not singular in containing irregularities and election tampering. It is an irrefutable fact that the 2016 election was tarred from the beginning with fraudulent activity committed by the Obama administration’s FBI, CIA, DOJ, the Democratic National Committee, and the Hillary Clinton campaign. The Russian collusion scandal, a hoax concocted by foreign intelligence operatives working for the Democratic Party presidential campaign ticket and tacitly nurtured by the Obama government, violated the civil rights of Americans, and attempted to tilt the 2016 contest in Clinton’s favor. This vicious ploy, to falsely link the Russian dictator with Trump, handicapped his entire presidency. The Russia hoax lie was kept alive even when it was clear to the perpetrators that it was all a fabrication. However, using this lie, key Democrats questioned the legitimacy of the Trump presidency (don’t miss this 12-minute collage of Democratic election negationists). Hillary Clinton flatly stated, as late as 2019, that Trump was an “illegitimate president.”

The truth is that Democrats have a history of negating election results when they lose. The presidential and gubernatorial elections of 2000, 2004, 2016, and 2018 were also negated (here is a 24-minute video). Some Democrats implied it, others flatly said that the election in question was “stolen.” Democratic lawmakers attempted to convince electors not to vote for Bush or Trump, depending on the election. In other words, they were obstructing a lawful process, according to the charges levied against Trump. Why aren’t Hillary Clinton and other Democratic election negationists and conspiracy theorists in jail?  

The First Amendment assures Americans the right to free expression. This is why the discourse echoed by the Democratic election deniers, as repulsive as it was, did not result in a criminal offense. Hillary and her fellow negationists were exercising protected speech, even if it was based on a politically orchestrated falsehood and could potentially incite others to break the law. The argument can be made that Marxist movements like Black Lives Matter and Antifa felt compelled to commit violence seeking systemic change based on the statements emitted by Clinton and others that raised doubts about the legitimacy of the American democracy.

Trump was also making use of his First Amendment rights when he challenged the veracity of the 2020 presidential election results. This indictment against the 45th president is a direct attack on the Constitution and free speech. When the circumstantial rarity of the presidential electoral process in question is considered, Trump’s defense is strengthened. One can argue whether the irregularities in the 2020 election impacted the outcome or not. However, when anyone makes a statistical comparison with voting patterns reported on November 3 and 4, 2020, as well as cross-examines historical voting data, no one can seriously deny the impressive anomalies discovered. The Democrats' war on Trump in this latest legal assault does not just plunder freedom of speech.

Biden’s latest DOJ indictment levied against the Republican front-runner in the 2024 presidential contest is plainly election tampering. The partial rationale emitted by then-FBI director James Comey for not recommending that Hillary Clinton be charged criminally for her handling and destruction of classified and privileged government material was, precisely, that she was involved in an election process. Comey admitted that throughout the FBI’s investigation, he believed Clinton would win the 2016 election. The judicial prudence exercised by the former FBI director was in full knowledge of the risks of delegitimizing the American elections.

The legacy of this callously bold attempt to impede a political opponent from competing in an election can undermine the entire American democratic system. When people do not trust the formerly accepted methods for choosing representation in a consensual government arrangement, popular violence replaces civility. The added component of criminalizing free speech because it challenges the narrative one political party promotes is detrimental to a free people. Biden and today’s Democratic Party are planting tyrannical seeds of destruction. A section within the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence addressed these concerns. “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.”