On Friday, Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell told The Blaze’s Glenn Beck “our forces” have confiscated a voting company server in Germany linked to alleged pro-Joe Biden fraud committed by Dominion Voting Systems. Both the military and the voting company in question have denied this claim.
On Saturday, Powell said Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and his secretary of state are “in on the Dominion scam” and they ought to be investigated for “financial benefit received about that time.”
On Sunday, President Donald Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis released an official statement disassociating Powell from the campaign’s efforts. This came as news to every single person watching, including those still involved in Trump’s re-election campaign.
When Frank Luntz, a TV gadfly and Republican pollster, pointed out how difficult it is to accept this late-in-the-game distancing, Ellis accused him of having a “micro penis.”
There’s a problem here, and it’s more than the tens of millions of dollars hopeful Americans have poured into a legal fight they feel is necessary to securing the future of our elections. The problem is this battle is far too important to be buried by conspiracy-theory accusations from the left and its media, which means it’s far too important to be left to conspiracy theorists.
Election fraud is not just a real issue, it is a deadly serious one to the future of our country. Original reporting at The Federalist and a number of other outlets has unearthed sprawling voter distrust born of first-hand experience with fraud after fraud after fraud in major Democratic machine cities.
It isn’t simply the dead voting, the living’s votes counting for candidates they did not vote for, and voters who didn’t even cast ballots counting for candidates they did not vote for — it’s difficult-to-impossible to unscramble mail-in ballots coming in after legal deadlines and counting anyway; it’s a systemic barring of supervision and oversight; it’s judges re-writing legal voting laws in the name of mass COVID-19 hysteria.
These problems are real and deserve real and deeply careful attention. Fraud undermines the very trust and faith underpinning the United States’ tradition of a peaceful transfer of power, and allowing fraud to continue without consequence is a threat to that peace.
In just more than six weeks, Georgia heads to two run-off elections that will decide control of the U.S. Senate. In less than two years, the entire country heads to elections that will decide control of both chambers of the U.S. Congress. Beyond that, Americans will continue to vote in election after election. How can these essential self-governance contests be taken seriously if voters are concerned they can’t trust if American laws will be upheld, fraud exposed, criminals held accountable, and elections trusted?
There are short-term fixes. Across the board, the Democratic Party has used exaggerated and irrational fears of COVID-19 to accomplish a veritable wish-list of election demands, and the Georgia legislature must convene an emergency session to undo judges’ orders on mass mail-in voting in time for the January election. Beyond that, accusations need to be pursued carefully and with force of law — not television bluster and internet conspiracy.
But before any of this, the Trump campaign legal team needs to stop the TV and Twitter theater; and pretending Powell was never really there isn’t remotely going to cut it.
It’s well-accepted both inside and outside campaign and serious election circles that once the vast majority of illegally counted votes are in the mix, it’s next to impossible to remove them beyond getting a federal judge to order a complete re-do on a state’s election. In the Trump campaign’s case, this would require multiple federal judges committing to multiple states redoing their elections. This isn’t going to happen — the crimes will not be undone in any kind of a meaningfully result-altering way.
What remains is ensuring they never happen at anywhere near this level again, and that is a realistic goal, but not an easy one. It will take time, diligence, courage, force of law, and careful, strategic movements by true professionals. And unfortunately for the president’s quite possibly robbed campaign, it will take moving on to the next fight.