Efforts to target minority voters as early as June 2020
“Jack Smith is going to accuse Donald Trump of voting fraud,” Marcy Wheeler wrote Wednesday.
The Department of Justice investigation into Donald Trump’s election-related crimes churns slowly. But it does churn. Trump has been named as a target of the investigation into election interference in 2020. Not by Russians as in 2016, but by Americans. Lots of them (Washington Post):
Trump disclosed on Tuesday he had been named as a target in special counsel Jack Smith’s probe of election interference. Hours later, the attorney general of Michigan announced she had issued forgery charges against 16 Trump supporters who had posed as the state’s presidential electors. A county prosecutor in Georgia is preparing to present a sweeping case to a grand jury, with indictments possible within weeks. And the attorney general of Arizona in recent months has ramped up a probe into attempts to undermine the 2020 results in that state.
The proliferation of charges and expected charges marks the most extensive effort yet to hold accountable those who attempted to help Trump remain in office after he lost the election. And because they come as the former president makes vindication a central pillar of his 2024 campaign, experts say they will mark an extraordinary test of the nation’s criminal justice system and political institutions.
One aspect of the investigation that even Wheeler missed earlier, she admits, was mentioned in Trump’s target letter: 18 USC 241, Conspiracy against Rights. Penalties for conspiring deprive Americans of their Constitutional rights include fines or imprisonment of “not more than ten years, or both” in cases not involving death, “kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill.” The statute dates from the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, the New York Times explains:
Congress enacted that statute after the Civil War to provide a tool for federal agents to go after Southern whites, including Ku Klux Klan members, who engaged in terrorism to prevent formerly enslaved African Americans from voting. But in the modern era, it has been used more broadly, including in cases of voting fraud conspiracies.
This morning Wheeler admits that this civil rights charge was in view the entire time but the press missed it. She did too. Trump and his allies attempted to “discount the votes of 81 million Biden voters,” and that effort began well in advance of January 6.
Smith has issued subpoenas to multiple local election officials “in the predominantly minority counties that Democrats need to win swing states, going back to June 2020, well before the election itself. By December 2022, DOJ was taking overt steps in an investigation that even before the election Trump had plans targeting minority cities,” Wheeler explains this morning:
And there may have been a still earlier sign of this prong of the investigation, from the NYT itself. Alan Feuer (with Mike Schmidt) reported in November that prosecutors were investigating Stone’s rent-a-mob tactics, going back to 2018 but really going back to the Brooks Brothers riot in 2000, the same fucking MO Stone has adopted for decades, using threats of violence to make it harder to count brown people’s votes.
Evidence from the Proud Boys trial indicates that the group was “standing by” to deploy to state capitols and voting centers to intimidate vote counters on Trump’s behalf immediately after the election went Joe Biden’s way. Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, found guilty of seditious conspiracy in May, wrote in a Nov. 8, 2020 text that his instructions were coming from “the campaign.”
This investigation has been happening. It’s just that reporters — myself included — didn’t report it as such.
It’s not just the epic mob Trump mobilized on January 6, an attempt to use violence to prevent the votes of 81 million Biden voters to be counted. It was an effort that went back before that, to use threats of violence to make it harder for election workers like Ruby Freeman to count the vote in big cities populated by minorities.
One reason TV lawyers didn’t see this is they have always treated Trump’s suspected crimes as a white collar affair, plotting in the Willard, but not tasing Michael Fanone at the Capitol.
But it is also about race and visibility.
January 6 was spectacular, there for the whole world to see.
But those earlier mobs — at the TCF center in Detroit, the State Farm arena in Atlanta, Phoenix, Milwauke — those earlier mobs were also efforts to make sure certain votes weren’t counted, or if they were, were only counted after poorly paid election workers risked threats of violence to count them, after people like Ruby Freeman were targeted by Trump’s team to have their lives ruined.
And we, the press collectively, didn’t treat those efforts to disqualify votes as the same kind of crime, as part of the same conspiracy, as Trump’s more spectacular efforts on January 6.
Trump specifically targeted counties based on the race of the voters he saw there, Wheeler adds:
Everyone in MI knows — and I’m sure Trump knows — he lost MI because he lost Kent County, which as more young people move into Grand Rapids has been getting more democratic in recent years. That Trump targeted Detroit and not Kent (or Oakland, which has also been trending increasingly Democratic) is a testament that this was about race.
If Smith can prove it — and it appears he hopes to — the white mans’ party that has organized itself for decades around allegations of widespread fraud by black and brown voters will see its top leader(s) charged with doing exactly what they claim their opponents do.