Election Deniers Rejected By American Voters, But The Threat Continues

Fred Wertheimer’s Weekly Note | November 17, 2022

President Joe Biden said before last week’s election that democracy was on the ballot.

It was and democracy won.

The clearest and most important example of this involved the Republican election deniers running for Secretary of State. As the officials responsible for state elections, they would have been in position to rig future elections for Republican candidates.

This likely was the gravest threat to fair and honest elections we faced in last week’s elections.

But voters saw the threat and defeated every election denier running for Secretary of State, except in the solidly red state of Indiana. This included Republican candidates in such presidential battleground states as Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, and Minnesota.

Republican election deniers were also defeated for Governor in the presidential battleground states of  Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin. (The Governor in Pennsylvania appoints the Secretary of State.)

Losing Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who has yet to concede and continues to sow doubt about Arizona’s election last week, has been ground zero for election deniers across the country.

Tim Michels, Wisconsin’s Republican gubernatorial candidate who lost last week, summed up the aim of election deniers when he outrageously asserted that if he was elected his party “will never lose another election” in the state.

The election-deniers’ movement, however, is not gone nor is the threat they pose.

The candidate who created the movement and is its continuing leader, former President Trump, announced his third run for President this week, while still singing his Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Trump continues to do all he can to rally the election-denier movement. And, Trump followers stand ready to attack the results of the 2024 presidential election if a Democrat wins, regardless of the actual vote count.

But, as Trump rolled out his 2024 campaign, the current legal threats facing him were powerfully documented in two major reports this week that detailed the potential criminal activities in which Trump has engaged.

This morning, Just Security published a 169-page report that concludes that a strong basis exists to indict former President Trump for crimes dealing with the classified national security documents he removed from the White House and stored at Mar-a-Lago.

The report examines potential charges against Trump stemming from both his improper taking of classified and other government documents and his efforts to obstruct the DOJ investigation of his actions.

The report, based on publicly available information, was prepared by a team of former federal prosecutors, defense attorneys, and other legal experts. (Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer and Counsel Don Simon served as co-authors, along with: Andrew Weissmann, Ryan Goodman, Joyce Vance, Norman Eisen, E. Danya Perry, Siven Watt, Joshua Stanton, and Alexander K. Parachini.)

That Trump is a former President and now a declared 2024 presidential candidate is and must be treated as irrelevant by Attorney General Merrick Garland in deciding whether or not to indict Trump.

Garland must base his decision on the facts and the law, and the standards he has repeatedly stated that “upholding the rule of law means applying the law evenly, without fear or favor.”

Also this week, Brookings released an updated in-depth report that concludes that former President Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia leaves him at substantial risk of criminal prosecution in Fulton County, Georgia.

Another Justice Department criminal investigation also has been long underway into whether Trump engaged in criminal activity in leading the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election and regarding the circumstances surrounding the January 6 violent insurrectionist attack on the Capitol.

If, as has often been said, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, then eternal vigilance is demanded in the months and years ahead to ensure that the anti-democracy forces in our country are permanently defeated.

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Fred’s Weekly Note appears each Thursday in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter. Read this week’s and other recent newsletters here. And, subscribe for free here and receive your copy each week via email.