In case you missed it, Attorney General Josh Kaul just added 10 additional felony charges against Kenneth Chesebro (a lawyer affiliated with Trump's 2020 campaign), Jim Troupis (a lawyer who represented Trump in Wisconsin in 2020), and Mike Roman (a former aide to Trump). Here's the meat of the article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (published Dec. 10, 2024):

"The additional charges allege forgery to defraud the Republican electors who cast their ballots for Trump in 2020, even though Joe Biden won the state.

"The new charges join the original single charge of felony forgery filed earlier this year. Chesebro, Troupis and Roman are scheduled to appear in court in Madison on Thursday."

Note that the new charges focus on defrauding the fake electors! In other words, the three men are charged because they deliberately lied to the 10 Republicans who were gullible enough to believe that their signatures on the forged documents would only be presented to Congress if the courts ruled that Trump had actually won the election in Wisconsin. The false electors themselves are not being criminally charged because most of them said "they did not consent to having their signatures presented as if Trump had won the state without a court ruling saying so."

You may remember that the Biden electors sued the fake Republican electors, in an unprecedented case. In settling that suit last year, the 10 Republicans "acknowledged their actions were used in an attempt to overturn an election." Here's how Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (ICAP) — one of several parties representing the lawful Democratic electors — described a crucial part of that settlement: the 10 false electors "have agreed not to serve as electors in the next election and not to sign such a certification in any future election in which they are not the duly certified electors under state law."

Four other states — Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Georgia — still have pending charges related to the fake electors scheme in state and federal courts.

Trump himself, of course, is successfully wriggling out of his two federal cases (the Insurrection case and the classified documents case). The fate of the RICO case in Atlanta, a state case and therefore not subject to the Department of Justice's prohibition on indicting a sitting president, seems to be in limbo.

And now Alvin Bragg, who successfully prosecuted Trump for 34 felonies stemming from his payments to silence Stormy Daniels, is now pleading with the court not to dismiss the case outright. According to Talking Point Memo's Morning Briefing this morning, Bragg is proposing "freezing the case until Trump is out of office, or agreeing that any future sentence wouldn’t include jail time. Another idea: closing the case with a notation that acknowledges his conviction but says that he was never sentenced and that his appeal wasn’t resolved because of presidential immunity." (To get to this morsel, you have to scroll down past the main article, "What We Take For Granted" — also worth a full read — and a few other short pieces.)

Yet we continue to see prosecutions of the January 6 insurrectionists and of the fraudulent electors. The rule of law, so foundational to our beloved country, continues to apply, albeit to the smaller fish to fry. The reality is, justice grinds exceedingly fine but way too slow. And it seems unable to reach the top of the kind of criminal pyramid Trump operates.

As a sign of our government's prosecutorial disfunction, FBI Director Wray told employees that he would be stepping down at the end of the Biden administration. The replacement Trump intends to nominate is deeply embedded in the rot of MAGAism. In his resignation announcement Wray hopes that the Bureau will be able to maintain its core values: "When you look at where the threats are headed, it's clear that the importance of our work --  keeping Americans safe and upholding the Constitution -- will not change. And what absolutely cannot, must not change is our commitment to doing the right thing, the right way, every time. Our adherence to our core values, our dedication to independence and objectivity, and our defense of the rule of law -- those fundamental aspects of who we are must never change" (ABC News, December 11, 20024). We shall see.

On that troubling note, let me end this edition of the newsletter with two actions you can take from home in front of your computer, laptop, or phone.

1. The Brennan Center for Justice held an event on December 10 Analyzing Trump's Plan to Invoke the Alien Enemies Act. The full video recording of the event is now available. The panel discusses various aspects of the problems Trump may face if he tries to use the Alien Enemies Act, passed in 1798, to rationalize his mass deportation scheme.
   
   
2. Please sign the League of Women Voters' petition to President Biden asking him to publish the Equal Rights Amendment. Here's the page for more information and to sign the petition.

EVENTS

Wednesday, December 11

Saturday, December 14

Monday, December 16

Wednesday, December 18

Saturday, December 21

Saturday, December 28

Tuesday, January 7

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