Leaked Fulton County Testimony Doesn't Reveal Trump Election Crimes...Just Criminal Stupidity

MAGA might not get what they want in 2024, but they'll definitely get what they deserve.

Fulton County’s prosecution of Donald Trump for challenging Georgia’s 2020 election results is a transparently-political abuse of the law to criminalize stupidity, and as such, the video clips ABC News got its hands on this week of what former Trump associates told prosecutors aren’t evidence of anything for which anyone should spend a day in jail. They are, however, useful windows into the sheer stupidity of a group we are now being asked to consider returning to the White House.

In the non-exhaustive clips, former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis (whom MAGA seems to think owed Trump the gesture of going to prison) shares the following exchange with former White House aide Dan Scavino that allegedly took place on December 19, 2020:

And he said to me, in a kind of excited tone, “Well, we don't care, and we're not going to leave.” And I said, “What do you mean?” And he said “Well, the boss,” meaning President Trump -- and everyone understood “the boss,” that's what we all called him -- he said, “The boss is not going to leave under any circumstances. We are just going to stay in power.” And I said to him, “Well, it doesn't quite work that way, you realize?” and he said, “We don't care.”

This is entirely consistent with the tone of Trump and his inner circle from that time frame, perhaps most purely expressed by Steve Bannon relishing how “crazy” things were gonna get from Trump’s intention to “just declare victory” on Election Night regardless of whether he actually won. And while Democrats want to spin it into a smoking gun that Trump was planning to barricade himself in the Oval Office like some tinpot dictator, in the context of how embarrassingly impotent his team’s every move was in challenging the election, it’s more likely Scavino was simply playing up the empty bravado because empty bravado is what MAGA thrives on.

But that’s nothing compares to the nuggets from once-respected attorney Sidney Powell, keeper of the Kraken that never was:

Did I know anything about election law? No. But I understand fraud from having been a prosecutor for 10 years [...] and knew generally what the fraud suit should be if the evidence showed what I thought it showed.

Wait—the highest-profile lawyer challenging an election is admitting she didn’t know anything about election law? That revelation is mind-boggling yet at the same time somehow perfectly appropriate for this bunch. Even so, it still doesn’t explain why the biggest piece of “evidence” she ever produced was some guy who saw sleazy practices in Venezuelan elections but had no actual knowledge of anything that happened in the American election at issue. I’m fairly confident specialized knowledge of election law is not necessary to grasp the problem with that.

[Trump] was specifically willing to appoint me special counsel, in fact, he looked over at [White House Counsel Pat] Cipollone three different times and said, “Do I have the authority to name her special counsel?” and Cipollone said, “Yes, you do.” And then somebody said, “Well, she doesn't have a security clearance.” So he looked at Cipollone and he said, “Do I have the authority to give her a security clearance?” and Cipollone said, “Yes, you do.” And then about the third time we went through that scenario, Cipollone, I think, said, “You can name her anything you want, Mr. President, and nobody's going to pay a bit of attention to it.”

So Trump wanted to appoint a special counsel on the sole qualification of the person he had in mind telling him what he wanted to hear. Perfectly presidential decision-making.

But it gets better. And by better, I mean so much worse. Regarding what she would have done as special counsel:

I guess he assumed, and I would have thought, that I would have looked at putting into effect a provision of 13848 that would have allowed the machines to be secured in four or five states or cities.

There seems to be some confusion here—Powell appears to be referencing a draft executive order Trump considered but never issued that would have directed the U.S. Secretary of Defense to “seize, collect, retain, and analyze” Dominion voting machines (yes, really), but the number she references is that of an executive order Trump did issue in 2018, which provides merely for the review of potential foreign election interference and sanctions on the offending parties.

Regardless, if you think Trump’s legal standing is a mess now, it would be nothing compared to if he actually tried to have the government seize voting machines on the sole basis of a Venezuelan with no inside information whatsoever and the ravings of an unscrupulous pillow salesman. Had he pulled the trigger on that brilliant plan, it’s entirely possible his second impeachment could have found enough votes to convict, in which case today’s political situation would probably be much saner and you’d be reading something else right now.

There was a big shouting match in which Rudy called me every name in the book and I was the worst lawyer he'd ever seen in his life. There were no circumstances under which he'd work with me on anything. He called me a bitch and I don't know what all, and that's pretty much all I remember about that one.

This is hilarious mostly because, while Giuliani’s alleged assessment of Powell’s legal credentials is hard to dispute, he’s hardly one to talk, being the guy who saw no problem with asking judges to simply turn disputed elections over to state legislatures so they could just give electors to Trump.

Yet for all the above, Powell was—or at least claims she was after the fact—smart enough to tell “everybody that I needed to get the hell out of DC” because she “didn't think any of it was a good idea”:

I just saw it as a really bad idea to have a rally over the end of the Trump presidency. I just wouldn't have encouraged people. In fact, there are several people that had plans to come up that I told not to come, and they didn't come.

Gathering a bunch of emotional, misinformed people with no real grasp of how the Electoral College process actually works in one place at the very end of that process and setting them up for inevitable disappointment? Why would that be a bad idea?

If anyone thinks any of the above sounds remotely like the caliber of reasoning ability that belongs in or anywhere near the White House, the silver lining is that getting their way in the Republican primary will guarantee they get the government they deserve—no matter who wins the general election.