Donald Trump is permanently banned from Facebook, with two years’ minimum, because Facebook considers him a threat to public safety. Buried in Reuters’ excellent write-up about the outright terroristic threats against election officials in Georgia (covered by Kerry Eleveld here) is a tidbit that proves—once again—that Facebook’s assessment isn’t hyperbole.
Reuters’ investigation revealed that the top prosecutor for most of Atlanta proper is looking into whether Trump himself may have inspired the death threats—which could exponentially increase Trump’s potential legal hurt.
In February, Fani Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, which includes almost all of Atlanta (except a sliver in the east which is in DeKalb County), began a criminal investigation into Trump’s efforts to steal Georgia’s 15 electoral votes. Specifically, the now-infamous Jan. 2. phone call in which Trump attempted to bully Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger into helping him “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s lead.
About a month into the investigation, Willis hired one of the nation’s leading experts on racketeering cases as a consultant. That was a strong indication that Willis was seriously considering hitting Trump with the legal equivalent of napalm. That alone should have been reason for Trump to be crapping himself, along with anyone else who was in on this shakedown.
But another reason for Trumpworld to be very afraid is buried in Reuters’ coverage of the threats received by Raffensperger and other election officials.
Willis said in a Feb. 10 letter that her office would also investigate “any involvement in violence or threats related to the election’s administration.”
That statement suggests Willis may be examining whether Trump, or others acting with him, solicited or encouraged death threats against election officials, said Clark Cunningham, a Georgia State University law professor. Such intimidation could fit into a possible racketeering probe into Trump if the threats were part of a coordinated effort to overturn the election, said Clint Rucker, an Atlanta criminal defense attorney and former Fulton County prosecutor.
So a prosecutor is investigating whether the president of the United States or his underlings were in any way involved in these threats. The mere fact I even have to write this is seismic.
It would definitely be in character for Trump to solicit such threats. We’re talking about a president who outed Nancy Pelosi’s plans to go on a fact-finding trip to the Middle East when he knew damned well that outing them could put her in danger. In other words, he showed a level of disregard for human life that I never thought I would see from ANY elected official.
That being said, proving that Trump actually solicited these threats would be dicey. After all, as former Trump lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen has told us, Trump speaks in code. Still, if Willis has seen enough to even suggest that Trump is in any way connected to these threats, that’s a BFD in and of itself.
Based on what has been publicly reported, Trump is potentially in yuuuuge legal doo-doo even if he wasn’t involved in these threats. Remember, there is ample evidence in the published record that Trump made that phone call when he damned well knew that he had lost. Specifically, he knew as early as the weekend of Nov. 7-8 that his only chance of reversing Biden’s win amounted to the legal equivalent of a rain dance. He knew as early as Nov. 12 that it was mathematically impossible for him to win enough court challenges to overturn Biden’s lead. As I noted in March, that would be lethal to his strongest defense—that he really believed Georgia had been stolen from him.
But this is another matter altogether. As Reuters notes, anyone who threatened election officials faces up to 10 years in prison and $100,000 in fines, and anyone who made death threats faces up to five years in prison and $1,000 in fines. To my mind, though, even if Willis doesn’t find evidence that Trump was actually involved in soliciting or encouraging those threats, if he knew about them and did nothing, it would bolster the case for permanently disqualifying Trump under the 14th Amendment.
All too often since Trump came down the escalator in 2015, we’ve found ourselves asking questions that we should never, ever, EVER have to ask about our leaders. Add this to the list. The mere fact that we even have to wonder if a president was in any way involved in terroristic threats of this sort should send a chill down the spine of any fair-minded American.