Who Says 2020 Wasn't Stolen?

Now that Jack Smith has done his thing, we can all take a deep breath, relax, and stop worrying about whether the Republic is about to be overthrown by a bunch of fascist thugs running all over the place with their AR-15s, right?

Except there’s only one little problem.

What if Trump was right? What if there really was a conspiracy to steal the 2020 election and the people who engaged in that conspiracy are now in charge of things?

Think I’m kidding? I’m not. And the reason I’m not kidding is because even if those lawyers representing Trump – Giuliani, Powell, e. al., - had all their challenges thrown out of court, those challenges represented a bunch of quickie legal arguments cobbled together. They didn’t represent the kind of careful, detailed, and thorough investigation that Jack Smith did.

Jack Smith was appointed Special Counsel in November 2022. The indictment charging Trump with helping to engineer January 6th was issued nine months later. In the interim, Smith basically had access to unlimited investigative resources, including the most advanced forensic technologies available anywhere.

What could Giuliani bring to bear in 2020 to help him develop a case? He had Bernie Kerik, whose investigative experience consisted of using some freebie cops to renovate his house in Queens when he was Commissioner of Corrections before he was indicted, convicted, and packed off to jail.

The next question which needs to be answered in trying to figure out whether there was a conspiracy for or against Trump is who would benefit if Trump didn’t get returned for a second term?

For one thing, there is no doubt in my mind that if Trump had taken the oath a second time in 2021, the thing he would have done immediately when he got back to the Oval Office was to shitcan Bill Barr and then clean house at the DOJ. Actually, he had already fired Bill Barr.

First to go would have been the FBI, whose agents would have been reduced to checking license plates in long-term parking lots at airports to track down stolen cars. He probably would have also downgraded the various counter-intelligence operations at CIA, NSA, FBI, and a few other agencies because he didn’t need anyone checking on the behavior of good friends like Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un.

Meanwhile, let’s look at the other side of the coin and let me tell you this: If someone had contacted me and asked me to pony up five hundred bucks to help the Democrats in my state ‘guarantee’ the election returns, I would have put down those five Franklins before the caller got off the phone.

I don’t think I was different from a lot of other people who were as shocked and pissed off as I was after Trump couldn’t bring himself to condemn the Nazis who marched through Charlottesville on August 12, 2017. The President of the United States doesn’t hesitate for one second in speaking out about those Nazi shitheads, okay?

For that matter, even Rush Limbaugh devoted an entire broadcast begging Trump to say something, anything about the murder of George Floyd in plain sight. But Trump needed a week to figure out what to say in order to ‘get his facts straight.’

I’m not talking about wanting to vote against someone who runs for President and says things with which you disagree. I’m talking about a guy who actually used the term ‘shithole countries’ to refer to places where people left in order to come to the United States for a better life.

I have said it many times. I mean it and I’ll say it again. If the only way we could get rid of Trump after one term was to steal the 2020 election, then that’s the way it had to be. And I’m certainly not the only one who felt and feels that way.

I’m reading a brilliant book on conspiracy theories, Conspiracy Theory in America, which was published in 2014, so it predates Trump. But the author’s basic argument (the author is Lance DeHaven-Smith who passed away in 2014) is that a frequent conspiracy is what he refers to as a state crime against democracy, or SCAD, which refers to “an attack from within on the political system’s organizing principles.” [Page 9.]

And the way you determine whether there was a SCAD operating within the government in 2020 is to figure out who was the beneficiary from this type of attack.

None of the post-election investigations of Trump’s charge of election ‘fraud’ attempted to analyze in depth the behavior of individuals who stood to benefit from Trump’s political demise. At best, the judgements that the election was ‘honest,’ (e.g., Bill Barr) were based on comparing results from voting machines with audits of some election returns.

Once Barr announced that the election was honest and fair, there was no chance that anyone in the Biden camp was about to take on any kind of post-election investigation at all.

Let’s remember that beginning the day after the election with that crazy press conference held by Giuliani across the street from the porno shop in Philadelphia, the people who should have been investigating this conspiracy – the Biden people – had everything to lose and nothing to gain if any kind of conspiracy had actually been found.

That’s certainly the case if a conspiracy to rig the 2020 election turned up today. Sand I’m still willing and able to plunk down those Franklins to make sure we win another one in 2024.