By Mike Huckabee
August 25, 2023
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On Thursday evening, President Trump turned himself in (I refuse to use the word “surrendered”) at the Fulton County jail, to be booked on 13 counts, including racketeering --- even though the act of challenging election results has never before been criminalized. Are you listening, failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams?
Before arriving at the jail, Trump shook up his legal team by replacing his lead attorney with Steven Sadow, who apparently anticipated Willis’ use of RICO and criticized this strategy as a way for prosecutors to introduce evidence that would not be admissible otherwise. Sounds like a strong addition to the team.
https://www.newsmax.com/
The process of booking Trump took 15 minutes, and, yes, they did take a mug shot, the expression of which we think fits the occasion perfectly. This is the seething rage of a fighter.
Trump also came in at 6’3” and 215 pounds. As you’ll see, his good physical shape was dismaying to those on the left, and right now, we’ll take our amusement where we can get it.
https://www.foxnews.com/
Speaking of mug shots, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani says his symbolizes “a chance to fight for my country.” Watch the video and be inspired. “Fani Willis,” he said after his arraignment, “will go down in American history for conducting one of the worst attacks on the American Constitution.”
https://www.newsmax.com/
Jonathan Turley said Trump’s mug shot is an example of people seeing the same thing differently. For Willis and the Democrats, the picture is a “trophy kill” to be admired, while for the other half of the country, it’s “a deeply upsetting moment, where they believe it’s the result of weaponizing our judicial system.” (You know which side is correct about that, and so does Turley.) He sees the disconnect being a reaction to the “overreach” that this case is. Willis is “using the RICO statute for great advantage,” Turley said, referring to her desire to try all 19 defendants together, “because they’re all part of a ‘conspiracy.’”
Yes, Willis wants a big show trial. But the allegations are “extremely weak,” Turley said, especially as pertaining to President Trump. Willis will have trouble, he said, and “it’s going to get messy,” noting that the March trial date she set “really borders on the laughable.” Question: So why did she initially want to set her trial to start the day before the Super Tuesday primary elections? (Perhaps feeling the heat, at the last minute, Willis requested a new start date.)
Turley called this “criminalizing the challenging of elections,” when Democrats have certainly challenged their share. “The whole case is based on this theory that Donald Trump really didn’t mean it,” he said --- that he didn’t really think he had won. Even if that were true (it isn’t), Democrats challenged Trump’s election in 2016 on no grounds at all. “In Donald Trump’s case, he insists that he does believe that Georgia could have been flipped with a recount.”
The way Fani Willis portrayed Trump’s phone call with Raffensperger, Turley said, “I think, is really evidence of the bias and unfairness…of this indictment.”
Sean Hannity, whose FOX NEWS show came on just after Trump was arraigned, started with a history lesson, which Huckabee readers will know: Democrats challenged the results of a presidential election themselves, with an alternate slate of electors in Hawaii to support John F. Kennedy in case the count in that state turned out differently. In another case, the extremely contentious presidential election of 1876, three states nominated alternate electors. That is to say, ALTERNATE SLATES OF ELECTORS ARE NOTHING NEW, and nobody has ever been charged with a crime for this until now.
(And let’s not forget all these Hollywood celebrities who need to be indicted on RICO charges for attempting to influence electors in the 2016 election:
https://time.com/4603254/
In fact, the left has gone so far this time, it’s almost beyond belief. President Trump is looking at charges for 91 felonies, punishable by 700 years in prison. Conveniently, all the trials are supposed to be starting during the time leading into the GOP primaries and the ‘24 general election. What are the odds that it would just happen this way?
To do this, they had to stretch the law as far as it could conceivably go, and even farther, to try and stop the GOP candidate whom polls show is by far the strongest. We’ve offered numerous opinions by noted legal experts that boiled down to “What the @#$%!” Also note that Fulton County DA Fani Willis refused to say whether or not she’s had communications with Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office. We all know that if she could deny that, she would.
Willis is currently in a fight to keep this trial in the Georgia courts, after defendants Mark Meadows and Jeffrey Clark filed motions to move their cases to federal court. She argued Wednesday before the federal district court of Northern Georgia. Here’s where they are with that…
https://www.newsmax.com/
Hannity shared a clip from CNN showing the deplorable conditions in the “notorious” (that’s the word often used) Fulton County jail --- filth, insects, overflowing toilets, broken air conditioning. Someone might ask DA Willis why the conditions at her jail are so notoriously atrocious. Is it because they were awaiting the arrival of Donald Trump and fantasizing about putting him in there? Or is it just more general incompetence?
Dan Bongino suggested that Trump shouldn’t pay the $200,000 bail, knowing that the Secret Service had the authority to say that conditions inside the Fulton County jail were not safe for the President. We would’ve loved to see the chaos that would have ensued if Trump had taken this tack. Too bad we’ll never know, because he paid the bail and got the heck out of there.
Trump was subdued as he came out, saying to the press that “it’s a sad day for America,” and it was. He said that what we’re seeing now is election interference, and it is. But he was more combative later, returning to Twitter (“X”) for the first time in two years to post his mugshot and this message: “ELECTION INTERFERENCE – NEVER SURRENDER!” and his website.
FOX NEWS legal analyst Gregg Jarrett, appearing on Hannity’s show, reiterated what we already know: that the DA would have to prove President Trump had a criminal state of mind; that is, that he was aware that what he was doing was unlawful. “Everything we know about his conduct,” Jarrett said, shows that “he thought he was availing himself properly of the legal process.” Exhibit A, Jarrett said, is Trump’s conversation with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, “in which he is complaining about ballot irregularities, faulty machines, valid votes that aren’t being counted, invalid votes that are being counted, election laws that are being violated, petitions that are being ignored, and in the end, he is demanding a recount and a review, which, by the way...Raffensperger has a duty to do.” Trump was simply asking him to carry out his responsibility.
Jarrett pointed out that DA Willis lied in an earlier filing, claiming that Trump said, “YOU need to find 11,780 votes.” But read the transcript of the call, and you’ll see that Trump wasn’t saying that at all. He thought he had MANY thousands more legitimate, uncounted votes than that, and he was just letting them know that this was the number required. “It’s perfectly lawful,” Jarrett said. In fact, as Jonathan Turley said that if you do a statewide review in a state like Georgia, “that’s not a lot.” It’s “not criminal --- it’s making a case for a recount.”
Also, it’s against the Canon of Ethics for prosecutors to run for office on a promise to put someone behind bars, Jarrett said. “Their duty is to see that justice is done, not to gain a conviction based on their own ambitions and desire to advance their career. That’s what Fani Willis has done, what Letitia James [has done], as well as Alvin Bragg.”
https://www.foxnews.com/video/
Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has opened an investigation into Willis’ indictment of Trump and the possible motivations behind it. Among many other issues, like the suspicious timing of the case and Willis’ motivation, Jordan has questions about whether federal funds and/or federal law enforcement agencies or officials were used in the investigation into Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, John Eastman and a bevy of others who were indicted.
“The committee is demanding the DA’s office turn over all documentation of its use of federal funds, communications with the DOJ or its components, and any records of cooperation with officials of the executive branch.” That might make interesting reading, unless they knew better than to put anything in writing.
Jordan cited “the threat that such state prosecutions can pose to the operations of the federal government.” Indeed, legal experts have said they shouldn’t even be overlapping with federal prosecutions this way.
https://www.newsmax.com/
Jordan and House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer appeared on the Hannity show Thursday night. Jordan said they had three questions for Fani Willis:
1) Did you coordinate with the Biden administration?
2) Did you work with Special Counsel Jack Smith?
3) Did you use federal funds to go after Trump? (They know Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg did.)
What, you might ask, is the significance of using federal funds? If she did that, her office is subject to congressional oversight. If anyone needs some oversight, it’s her.
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