Bedtime for bozos
There was a video tape released this week of Kelli Ward, the Chair of the Arizona Republican Party, announcing a slate of fake electoral votes for Arizona at a meeting in November of 2020. She said only two sentences comprised of only 27 words, but they will turn out to be the most expensive words she ever uttered in her life:
“For President, Donald J. Trump of the state of Florida, number of votes: eleven. For Vice President, Michael R. Pence of the state of Indiana, number of votes: eleven.”
You’ve heard the term, “lawyered up?” Well, when the time comes in your life that you have to get lawyered up, it starts costing big bucks, in fact very big bucks. The kind of lawyer that Kelli Ward had to hire this week when she was subpoenaed by the 1/6 House Select Committee charges upwards of $1000 an hour. That’s for a good one. The kind Kelli Ward will need – a better one -- costs at least $1500 an hour. Typical up-front retainers for such legal gun-slingers start at $100 thousand and go steeply up from there. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Kelli didn’t write a check or sign a guarantee for a quarter of a million dollars this week.
This is because the tape that found its way onto CNN and MSNBC was recorded at a meeting of Republicans in a room at what appears to be the Arizona Republican Party Headquarters where Kelli and ten other people attired in what you might call “business casual” signed a fake document certifying that they were Arizona’s electors and that they cast their official electoral ballots for Trump and Pence, who had just lost the election on November 3. The document they signed was formally submitted to the Archivist of the United States at the National Archives and to the President of the Senate, following a procedure put forth in Article II, Section 1, Clause 3 of the Constitution, and in the Electoral Count Act of 1877.
The governor of Arizona had already done this, of course, with the real electoral votes for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris who had won the state. But Kelli and her 10 Republican compatriots didn’t care about this fact, because they were following a plan put forth in a memo written by a lawyer named Kenneth Chesebro to James R. Troupis, a lawyer for the Trump campaign, who forwarded the memo to Rudy Giuliani, who was functioning as Trump’s personal lawyer, and another lawyer, John Eastman, who has claimed to be a lawyer for Trump. Both of these gentlemen were stage-managing a coup that involved submitting slates of fake electoral votes from the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all of which Trump lost. I realize that’s a list of a lot of lawyers, all of whom were passing memos and fake documents among themselves, but that was what was going on back in November and December of 2020 when Trump was casting wildly about looking for a scheme that would enable him to overturn the results of the election.
Many people have been subpoenaed by the 1/6 Select Committee for their involvement in the fake electoral vote scheme, which means that many people have been retaining many very expensive attorneys to represent them as they deal with their subpoenas. Last month, the 1/6 Select Committee subpoenaed 14 people who had signed fake documents claiming to be electors from the 7 battleground states Trump lost. This week, the committee issued six more subpoenas, including the one to Kelli Ward. Among the others subpoenaed were Michael A. Roman and Gary Michael Brown, who had been director and deputy director of election day operations for the Trump campaign – in other words, the two men who had been in charge on the day Trump lost. Also subpoenaed was Douglas J. Mastriano, a Pennsylvania state senator who had been among those invited to the White House by Trump when he was leaning on state representatives to reverse the results in the states he had lost, and Laura Cox, a former chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party, and Mark W. Finchem, an Arizona state representative. Finchem had been on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6 and was said by the 1/6 Committee to have been in communication with leaders from the “Stop the Steal” movement. According to the committee, Finchem claimed that he had traveled to Washington to “deliver an evidence book and letter to Vice President Pence showing key evidence of fraud in the Arizona presidential election and asking him to consider postponing the award of electors.”
The 1/6 Select Committee has subpoenaed their cell phone records and text messages and emails and other documents and ordered all six to appear for depositions next month.
Can’t you just see Kelli Ward and her ten co-conspirators sitting around that conference table in the Republican Party Headquarters in Phoenix signing their fake electoral vote certifications and getting ready to officially submit them to the Archivist of the United States and the President of the Senate? When Kelli had finished reading the words they were attesting to, the whole room broke out in applause.
Laura Cox had witnessed Rudy Giuliani pressuring state lawmakers in Michigan to overturn the election results. With Ms. Cox present, Giuliani told the lawmakers that certifying Biden as the winner would be “a criminal act,” according to the 1/6 Committee subpoena.
What is actually a criminal act is forging a fake document attesting that you are a state elector and certifying that this is your official vote for Trump and Pence and submitting that document up the official constitutional chain of officials as if it was a legal, legitimate document and not the fake it actually is.
Which is why a whole bunch of Republicans in seven states around the country and in Washington D.C. and elsewhere are now lawyering up at great personal expense. All of their cheerleading for Trump and 1/6 electoral fakery and conspiring with one another to overturn the election is going to turn out to be the most expensive thing they ever did in their lives – more expensive than playing golf at a Trump resort, more expensive than attending a fund-raiser at Mar a Lago, more expensive than all those nights they spent at the Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C. for the inauguration or for the “Stop the Steal” rally or to take a special White House tour and Oval Office visit for state legislators to listen to all the reasons they should come up with fake evidence to overturn the election in their states, more expensive even than the divorces and ancillary lawsuits that may flow from all of their fakery and posturing and other nonsense.
The only thing that might be more expensive is having to retain criminal attorneys if and when a Washington D.C. grand jury gets around to handing down indictments for defrauding the government and falsifying official documents, because those kinds of lawyers’ fees, the money they will have to spend to keep themselves out of jail, start at $2000 an hour and go up steeply and quickly from there, especially if you aren’t able to get a plea bargain for ratting out your friends.
But of course if they did that, the bozos would have to face The Wrath of Trump, and if you’re a Republican and you ever want to play a round of golf again in your life, it just might be worth it to grin and bear it and pony up the megabucks and hire yourself a mongo-supremo-expenso lawyer and hope like hell he or she can keep you out of jail and off Trump’s shitlist.
Good luck. Not.
It doesn’t seem to get mentioned much, but these fake electoral vote certifications were actually submitted to the Archives, presumably by mail or FedEx or UPS, or perhaps they were sent electronically. That makes them mail fraud or wire fraud, which is the Napoleon of white collar crimes, carrying penalties of up to 20 years.
Does the nose of the far left "bozo" in the picture look like it's grown beyond normal extension? Not nose-shaming, just reminded me of Pinocchio. Button or long, liars all.