Legal and political experts are responding to Thursday night’s bombshell news of secret recordings of then-President Donald Trump, two weeks after the 2020 election, allegedly personally pressuring two Wayne County, Michigan election officials to not certify the results for Joe Biden. It “sounds like a classic case of bribery,” says one expert, and is being called a “huge, systemic plot” to “seize power despite losing an election,” by another.
“We’ve got to fight for our country,” Trump told the two officials, called “canvassers,” in the November 17, 2020 recordings, according to The Detroit News which broke the story. “We can’t let these people take our country away from us.”
Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, also on the call with Trump, at one point reportedly told the two officials, “If you can go home tonight, do not sign it,” referring to the certification documents. “We will get you attorneys.”
Trump added, “We’ll take care of that.”
Those were not the outgoing president’s only remarks.
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“Trump said Republicans had been ‘cheated on this election’ and ‘everybody knows Detroit is crooked as hell,’ according to the recordings,” The Detroit News reports. “Trump told Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, the two GOP Wayne County canvassers, they’d look ‘terrible’ if they signed the documents after they first voted in opposition and then later in the same meeting voted to approve certification of the county’s election results, according to the recordings.”
“How can anybody sign something when you have more votes than people?” Trump also said on the recordings, a false claim.
The following morning Trump repeated that claim on social media, and appeared to have specific knowledge of the canvassers’ intentions, calling them “harassed patriot Canvassers.”
Wayne County includes Detroit, the 29th-largest city in the U.S.
According to NCRM’s review of the Wayne County records for the 2020 election, Joe Biden won 68% of the vote in the county, or 597,170 votes. Donald Trump won 30%, or 264,553 votes.
Professor of law, MSNBC legal analyst, and former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance was a federal prosecutor for 25 years with a focus on prosecuting public corruption.
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“Offering an official something of value (services of a lawyer) in exchange for withholding official action (certifying the Wayne County vote) sounds like a classic case of bribery under Michigan State law,” Vance wrote on X.
Professor of law Richard Painter, the former chief White House ethics lawyer, responded to the news by saying, “Michigan prosecutors should charge Trump with election fraud.”
The Atlantic’s Brian Klass is a University College London associate professor in global politics and the author of “Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us,” and the co-author of “How to Rig an Election.”
“Look,” Klass wrote on X in response to the news of the Trump recordings, “there was a huge, systematic plot, orchestrated by Trump, to seize power despite losing an election. It’s an attempted authoritarian power grab—an attempted dictatorship. If you vote for him again, you’re voting for a man who has tried to kill democracy—and will do so again.”
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Image: Official Whte House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian via Flickr