{"id":11444,"date":"2023-08-13T14:32:06","date_gmt":"2023-08-13T14:32:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=11444"},"modified":"2023-08-13T14:32:06","modified_gmt":"2023-08-13T14:32:06","slug":"here-is-why-trumps-contingent-electors-say-they-did-nothing-illegal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=11444","title":{"rendered":"Here Is Why Trump&#8217;s &#8216;Contingent&#8217; Electors Say They Did Nothing Illegal"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>\n\n&#8220;Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel this week&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/reason.com\/2023\/07\/19\/does-trumps-alternate-electors-plan-justify-criminal-charges-against-them-and-him\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">announced<\/a>&nbsp;criminal charges against 16 Republicans who presented themselves as the state&#8217;s electors after the 2020 presidential election. Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Norman Eisen and New York University law professor Ryan Goodman responded with a&nbsp;<em>New York Times<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2023\/07\/18\/opinion\/trump-false-electors-michigan.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">essay<\/a>&nbsp;headlined &#8220;Trump&#8217;s Conspirators Are Facing the Music, Finally.&#8221; As Eisen and Goodman see it, the Michigan defendants participated in a criminal conspiracy to overturn Joe Biden&#8217;s victory by posing as the state&#8217;s true electors.<br>The defendants, of course, do not accept that narrative. As they see it, their conduct was a legitimate way of preserving objections to a contested election, grounded in historical precedent and the advice they received from Donald Trump&#8217;s lawyers. The &#8220;contingent&#8221; Trump electors in Georgia, who have been informed that they are targets of a similar investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, make the same basic argument. Press coverage of these investigations, which routinely&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2023\/05\/05\/us\/trump-georgia-election-investigation.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">describes<\/a>&nbsp;the targets as &#8220;fake&#8221; or &#8220;bogus&#8221; electors, tends to dismiss that argument out of hand. But it is worth a closer look, because it is central to the question of whether prosecutors can prove that would-be electors who followed the Trump campaign&#8217;s advice acted with criminal intent.&#8221;<br><a href=\"https:\/\/reason.com\/2023\/07\/20\/here-is-why-trumps-contingent-electors-say-they-did-nothing-illegal\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">https:\/\/reason.com\/2023\/07\/20\/here-is-why-trumps-contingent-electors-say-they-did-nothing-illegal\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel this week announced criminal charges against 16 Republicans who presented themselves as the state&#8217;s electors after the 2020 presidential election. Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Norman Eisen and New York University law professor Ryan Goodman responded with a New York Times essay headlined &#8220;Trump&#8217;s Conspirators Are Facing the Music, Finally.&#8221; As Eisen and Goodman see it, the Michigan defendants participated in a criminal conspiracy to overturn Joe Biden&#8217;s victory by posing as the state&#8217;s true electors.<\/p>\n<p>The defendants, of course, do not accept that narrative. As they see it, their conduct was a legitimate way of preserving objections to a contested election, grounded in historical precedent and the advice they received from Donald Trump&#8217;s lawyers. The &#8220;contingent&#8221; Trump electors in Georgia, who have been informed that they are targets of a similar investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, make the same basic argument. Press coverage of these investigations, which routinely describes the targets as &#8220;fake&#8221; or &#8220;bogus&#8221; electors, tends to dismiss that argument out of hand. But it is worth a closer look, because it is central to the question of whether prosecutors can prove that would-be electors who followed the Trump campaign&#8217;s advice acted with criminal intent.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[1104,431,660,221,372,198,1019,428,170],"class_list":["post-11444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-share","tag-authoritarianism","tag-democracy","tag-dictatorship","tag-donald-trump","tag-election","tag-elections","tag-electoral-college","tag-electoral-system","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11444"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11444\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11445,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11444\/revisions\/11445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}