When I was young, the old folks used to say, “You know how to tell when a politician is lying to you? Easy, his lips are moving.” I used to laugh at that old saw until after the 2016 election and Donald J. Trump, the Liar in Chief, was elected to sit in the Oval Office for four years. I mean, I knew that politicians, including the president, weren’t always truthful, but this individual took bending the truth to Uri Geller extremes. According to the Washington Post, during his four years in office, Trump uttered false or misleading claims a total of 30,573 times, for an average of about 21 per day. Over 490 suspect claims were catalogues during his first 100 days in office and on November 2, 2020, the day before the election he made 503 false or misleading claims as he traveled across the country vainly trying to drum up votes in his unsuccessful effort to earn a second term.
Unless you’ve been living in a cave in Tibet, you know that he’s continued the habit of bending the truth since reluctantly leaving office. But his lies, and the falsehoods of those who have hitched their wagons to his facing star, just might be catching up with him.
Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis has indicted Trump and more than a dozen others for election fraud, racketeering and other charges in connection with Trump and his allies’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Unlike the three previous criminal indictments which are narrowly focused, Willis is going after Trump and his confederates for ‘engaging in a criminal racketeering enterprise to overturn Georgia’s presidential election result’ under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, a law that has been used to take down organized crime in the past. Under Georgia’s RICO criminal enterprises are not required to be long running and there are nearly 50 underlying crimes that qualify as racketeering. This law does not require that a defendant directly engaged in criminal activity, just that they were part of a large organization that did. This means that Willis only has to prove that Trump knowingly coordinated with others who did. One of the strongest pieces of evidence that she will have to present to a jury is Trump himself, and his inability to utter the truth—along with what seems to be a compulsion on his part to keep lying just as he did during his time in office. Under Georgia law, false statements can be prosecutable if a person lies to a state official about important or meaningful facts in matters which they directly oversee. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state,” Trump said in a phone call to Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a proven falsehood.
This is but one of many lies that Trump has uttered about the 2020 election, and it, along with others will in all likelihood be entered into evidence against him. This one was even recorded. He will, of course, claim that this was constitutionally protected speech, but under Georgia law, this is like yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. Sorry, bub, not protected.
The battle lines have been drawn. If the defendant is smart, from this point on, he’ll let his lawyers do the talking and he’ll keep his mouth shut. Given who we’re talking about, though, I wouldn’t bet money on that happening.