The charges against Trump are a fraud

 Paul Ingrassia:

The legal claims stipulated in Jack Smith’s latest indictment are spurious, constitutionally unfounded, and patently unlawful. The overriding theory of Smith’s case is that Donald Trump conspired to defraud the United States and obstruct an official election proceeding as president. The Smith indictment further stipulates a “conspiracy against rights,” which again goes to the President’s alleged scheme to knowingly conspire to deprive Americans of their right to vote and have their votes counted fairly. As will be discussed below, each one of these claims are easily discreditable, and have no basis whatsoever in law or fact.

Under count one, 18 U.S. Code § 371, the United States improperly brought a criminal charge for fraud using a statute that the Supreme Court has circumscribed repeatedly over many years to apply specifically to financial crimes only. Thus, no matter how many times Jack Smith insists and repeatsthat President Trump “knowingly” deceived the American people of election fraud does not make it true. Furthermore, Jack Smith does exactly what he accused President Trump and his cadre of “co-conspirators” of doing in his indictment: by “reverse engineering” statutes and shoehorning them into criminal statutes for which they were never intended, Smith manifests wholly novel and ahistorical legal theories, out of thin air, without even a gesture to the countervailing historical and legal record for which they were originally designed and to which they have only ever been applied by courts.

Even under the broader definition of “defraud”—i.e. in the anomalous instances where this statute might be applied outside of the financial crimes context—there is still no basis for these particular charges. It will be impossible for the prosecution to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the President was working to “interfere with or obstruct one of [the government’s] lawful functions by deceit, craft, or trickery, or by means that are dishonest,” since President Trump always was—on the advice of competent counsel—following the constitutionally-permissible and lawful avenues to challenge the election. (United States v. Nersesian, 824 F.2d 1294, 1313 [2d Cir. 1987].)

Similarly, the charge under 18 U.S.C. § 241, a Reconstruction-era statute under which Douglas Mackey was recently convicted for tweeting that Hillary Clinton supporters could text their votes instead of voting at the polls, presupposes that the actions taken by the President were dishonest in nature. The Supreme Court read into this statute the requirement of a specific intent to deprive another of a right or interfere with another’s rights. See United States v. Guest, 383 U.S. 745. For the same reasons as above, such a burden cannot possibly be proven. President Trump was acting under his belief that the election was improperly conducted and took the steps necessary within the bounds of the Constitution to challenge the results.
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There appears to be a certain number of mostly Democrats who are so discombobulated by Trump that they are willing to concoct dubious means to try to thwart democracy and keep people from being able to vote for Trump.