Debunking Jack Smith’s Latest Indictment Against President Trump

This is part one of a three-part legal commentary, which is focused on the overwhelming evidence of systemic election fraud that rendered outcome-determinative harm upon the 2020 election.

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When the Supreme Court denied the State of Texas’ lawsuit in December of 2020 to challenge the integrity of that year’s general election for lack of Article III standing, there already existed an overwhelming trove of evidence of procedural abnormalities and statistical anomalies that pointed to 2020’s fundamental illegitimacy.   For starters, well over 155 million votes were allegedly cast in that year’s cycle – the most of any vote total in presidential history, surpassing 2016’s previous record setting high by a whopping 28 million votes. Moreover, the 2020 election not only saw the highest percentage of votes cast either by mail or absentee ballot in modern American history, but it was the first time in which election day voting represented a minority of all methods of voting cast: fewer than one third of voters that cast their ballots in the 2020 general election did so in person on Election Day.

Even if there was absolutely no other evidence of election fraud, the simple fact that more votes were cast than any other election in history (the majority of the ballots having been cast prior to the official election day by mail, a method of voting historically recognized as being rife with fraud, not only in the United States but other Western democracies) should have signaled to any reasonable observer that extreme diligence and precautionary care ought to have been taken to minimize the high probability of outcome determinative error in a feat of that size and scale. 

The results bear this out: the alleged winner of the race was not declared by most mainstream networks, including ABC, CBS, NBC, as well as mainstream cable networks like Fox News and CNN, until November 7^th, four whole days after the polls closed.  This was the longest gap in time to declare a winner since 2000, when that year’s outcome had to be decided by the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore. 

Other abnormalities existed: for example, despite Trump winning 18 of the 19 bellwether counties that have voted for the president in every election from 1980 to 2016, the mainstream media still called the race for Joe Biden.  Moreover, the three major swing states – Florida, Iowa, and Ohio – which voted for the winner of every presidential election since 1996, all voted for Donald Trump. Biden won only 509 counties, compared with the 2500+ won by Trump, or just 16.7% of all the nation’s counties, the fewest of any presidential “winner” in history. On top of everything else, there were the high-profile newsworthy abnormalities that occurred on election night, or in the hours and days immediately following, that plainly did not make sense.

Obviously, there was the story of the water main break in Georgia, in critical Fulton County, which occurred as vote counters were still tabulating the ballots on election night. The pipe breakage conveniently bought officials more time to delay the counting of nearly 40,000 outstanding, outcome-determinative absentee ballots.

Then there were the countless stories of “ballot trafficking,” as meticulously documented in the now infamous Dinesh D’Souza film, 2000 Mules, whereby thousands of nonprofit hires or “mules” dumped fraudulent absentee ballots in critical swing states like Georgia and Arizona overnight, which contaminated the process and likely changed the final result of the election in those states.

There was also, of course, a patent lack of transparency in the days following the election, particularly in Democratic strongholds such as Philadelphia, where major election sites were in some cases unlawfully closed off completely from the public, violating their fundamental right in transparent elections – as well as assurances from public officials, that ballot counting was being done consistent with state law and being executed impartially and without political bias. It was impossible to guarantee those assurances in Philadelphia or Fulton County or Maricopa County; indeed, the public’s constitutional rights in these procedures were fundamentally violated, itself sufficient grounds to demand recounts and reforms in at least those select battleground states. 

Recounts, audits, and legal challenges commenced throughout the months of November and December, many extending well beyond the codified date on which the electors for President and Vice President must meet. However, a major caveat existed: not unlike the unprecedented (and, in many cases, unlawful) manner in which the state’s elections were carried out, the recounts and audits were conducted sloppily at best. So as not to belabor this point, here are just a few examples: 

In Georgia, where Joe Biden became the first Democrat to win the state in nearly 30 years by a minuscule 11,779 votes (or by just 0.23%), several audits and recounts were conducted in the weeks after Election Day. Statewide, the “official” Georgia hand recount resulted in Biden’s lead slimming by 1,274 votes, over 10% of the margin of victory. It should be noted, however, as a major source of controversy, each audit occurred without signature verification: after the signed envelope containing an absentee voter’s ballot was received, the ballot was removed with no way of reconnecting the two again.

While some argue this falls under the Georgia constitution’s requirement of a secret ballot (though it should be noted that other states with similar secrecy requirements enable the reconnection of the ballots), Georgia failed to properly audit the 2020 election and mitigate the legitimate concerns raised. Particularly when a majority of voters cast their ballots by mail, which led to the heightened scrutiny in the first place, it is clear that the systems in place lacked the requisite means to ensure the orderly count, recount, and audit of those votes. In other words, it was evident that Georgia’s election system was unable to handle the magnitude of mail-in ballots received in the 2020 election (and 2021 runoff).

In fact, the secretary of state’s failure to properly implement a signature-verification system led to a complete overhaul of the process: as a result of Georgia’s 2021 election law, voters now verify their absentee ballots by providing a driver’s license number or identification card. To add insult to injury, on top of the already dubious “signature verification” scheme which experts agree is a notoriously subjective process to begin with (for instance, what accounted for the general election having only 32.5% of the invalid signatures cured, compared to over 60% in the 2021 runoff?), votes from Georgia’s 159 counties were audited multiple times, yielding staggering results: an audit of Fulton County on November 16, 2020 (more than a week after the media declared Joe Biden the President-elect), “found” (the infamous word at issue in what Democrats found to be an impeachment-worthy phone call between President Trump and Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger) 2,600 otherwise uncounted ballots as a result of a person “not executing their job properly,” Fayette County failed to count another 2,755 votes, and several other forgotten memory cards carrying hundreds of votes were discovered across the state.

These challenges continued for weeks on end, such that another audit was announced in Cobb County on December 14, 2020, the appointed day on which the electors were scheduled to meet. This is not to overlook the ongoing legal challenges waged in response to the perceived infractions as well. This is the backdrop that caused the meeting of the alternate electors in Georgia: which many legal scholars have pointed out that a similar scenario unfolded in Hawaii in 1960, even though Hawaii officially certified the election and had sent its own electors for Nixon accordingly. But because there was an ongoing legal challenge, an alternate slate of electors was sent by a group of Democrats for Kennedy. In the 1960 case, it was the alternate slate of electors that ultimately were counted and certified.

This similarly occurred in Pennsylvania in 2020, where mail ballots constituted about 40% of the ballots statewide (up from 4% in 2016). There, the margin of victory was a narrow 1.17%, and legal challenges to the election procedures occurred well into December. Following an order by Justice Alito to separate the ballots arriving after election day, a deadline to challenge the state’s mail-in votes was set a day after the “safe harbor” deadline, or the day by which states were required to resolve their election controversies. Clearly, it was far from being inconceivable that a court challenge to the process might arise.

Furthermore, a September 2020 decision from Pennsylvania’s supreme court clarified state law. The court required that ballots be placed in “secrecy envelopes” in order to be counted. “Naked ballots” lacking the envelope were not to be counted, which led to significant confusion during the  primary. As a result, Pennsylvania implemented massive voter education efforts to prepare election workers specifically on how to manage these ballots, which were returned without having first been placed in a secrecy envelope. It remains unclear how many “naked ballots” were cast during the 2020 general election. Likely not wholly unrelated, it is noteworthy that the 2020 general election saw a significantly lower mail-in ballot rejection rate – for example, in Bedford County, whereas in the 2021 primary election 4.6% of the ballots were rejected, in the 2020 election only 0.7% were rejected.

In Wisconsin, the hundreds of drop boxes installed during the 2020 election to collect absentee ballots were deemed “illegal under Wisconsin statutes” by the state’s supreme court in 2022. This is particularly troublesome, considering a whopping 40.8% of the ballots in the 2020 were cast by mail absentee, compared to just 4.8% in 2016. Because of these illegal election law changes, as explicitly referenced by John Eastman in his memoranda, the country may never know how many votes in Wisconsin were cast and counted in accordance with the state legislature’s procedures, a state that went for Biden by just around 20,000 votes, or a 0.63% margin of victory. Wisconsin also saw a record high turnout rate, so much so that many observers have questioned the definition of “turnout rate” itself: 89% of registered voters in Wisconsin cast their ballots in 2020. (This high turnout rate is only sensible if one considers the number of voters compared to the registered voters statewide, as well as if one prefers to look at the number of ballots cast compared to the “total voting-age population.”)

The election law challenges are not limited to Wisconsin, either. Several states saw improper changes to election laws by bodies other than the state legislatures, in violation of Article 1, section 4, clause 1 of the Constitution. While some of the lawsuits were successful in the weeks leading up to the election, others after November 3 were dismissed not on the merits of the case, but instead due to lack of standing in many instances. Regardless, many were ongoing at the appointed time at which the electors were scheduled to meet in December. 

Then there was the rapacious censorship. The President of the United States was, in the weeks following the fraudulent election, outright censored, shadowbanned, and blacklisted from every major social media platform, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter – his influence and reach severely undercut and silenced by a partnership of hostile government agents and private actors in Silicon Valley who harbored well-known political and personal antipathies against the 45^th President. Even while still on those platforms, however, there has come to light overwhelming evidence that pro-Trump stories, or at the very least, stories perceived as anti-Biden or anti-Democrats, were shadowbanned, if not outright censored, by those very same platforms. The Twitter files shed some light onto what had happened behind the scenes. FBI agents, in collusion with censors who worked at Twitter, conspired surreptitiously to find out ways to shut down content-based political speech, which should be protected speech under the First Amendment. The most damning revelation to have come out of the Twitter files was, of course, the concerted effort to silence the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, as originally reported by the NY Post in the days and weeks leading up to November 3^rd, whereby regime censors blanket labeled the whole story as “disinformation,” thereby licensing – in the eyes of our media apparatchik – unbounded censorship of the story. 

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The reports of thousands of emails exchanged between Hunter and business associates over a decade-long period strongly hinted at a money-laundering scheme involving the Ukrainian company Burisma, for which Hunter Biden is currently facing criminal charges, and on which the son of Joe Biden deeply profited through his father’s lucrative contacts to foreign governments and other connections afforded by his public office. The FBI actually wound up granting expedited top secret security clearances, normally reserved exclusively to high-ranking government officials, to members of Twitter, in order to create a special portal for Twitter staff to counteract disinformation – which really meant any reporting that might benefit the Trump campaign at the expense of the Biden campaign. 

Indeed, when polled nearly 4 in 5 Americans felt that but for the censorship of the Hunter Biden story, the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, rigged procedures put to one side, would have been different. And Twitter merely scratches the surface; other major technology companies, like Google, Facebook, and Apple, were surely also engaging in draconian censorship against Donald Trump and conservatives in the lead-up to the election. Evidence for this is observed in the slipshod reasoning those other companies used to justify their respective bans of the 45^th President. That Facebook adjudicated the decision of whether to keep Donald Trump on the platform in the aftermath of January 6^th using its own, self-appointed “Oversight Board” – admittedly, employing an industry-wide approach utilized by many other social media companies – without consultation with the public, despite Facebook holding itself out effectively as an agent of the federal government, further attests to the extralegal steps taken by the deep state to circumvent traditional legislative and democratic channels and instead resorting to extraordinary means to accomplish its principal aim: to oust Donald Trump from office.

The examples cited of Twitter and Facebook are but two notable cases that have been widely reported, and almost certainly only represent the tip of the iceberg for the magnitude of the fraud. Indeed, the full scale of the collusion between the federal government and Silicon Valley, as just one prong of the deep state’s overall conspiracy to bring down the 45th President, will probably remain unknown for many years to come.  However, the reporting of what occurred behind the scenes goes a long way towards meeting – and, in our estimation, far surpassing – the evidentiary standard needed to prove election fraud, and it does so beyond a reasonable doubt. And all that evidence only still merely scratches the surface of election fraud because it merely addresses the interference and trampling of First Amendment rights carried out by “private” actors, as opposed to state actors, another separate operation unto itself. 

Finally, prior to moving onto the structural changes to election procedures that were implemented by government actors in the lead-up to the 2020 general election under the pretext of national security licensed by the pandemic, we would be remiss to ignore the larger sociocultural context in which the 2020 election arose. 

For months on end, the national consciousness was relentlessly bombarded with searing images of rioters pillaging the streets of virtually every major American city without consequence in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. Historic churches, monuments, and statues were desecrated and burned; whole city blocks were overtaken by radical Leftist paramilitary groups, such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter; law enforcement, rather than maintaining order, instead abandoned their oaths, causing record levels of demoralization in police forces nationwide, forcing many otherwise competent officers into early retirement; many of those same officers chose to kneel rather than condemn the secular martyr and patron saint of the nascent woke republic, George Floyd, giving rise in real time; protestors used every opportunity to deny President Trump of his electoral mandate, using force and manipulation to kowtow lawmakers to submit to their demands, or face harassment and threats of violence.

As all these things played out in real time, occupying an outsized perch in the national consciousness ever since President Trump was declared the winner in November of 2016, it was only natural that the pendulum would swing in the opposite direction. And that it did. A January 6^th kind of protest, albeit extraordinarily mild relative to the civilization-ending riots that had broken out, causing billions in damages, just the preceding summer, marked a kind of retaliation against the creeping and unrelenting totalitarianism by the Left all throughout the four years Trump was in office. 

To illustrate the point more concretely: whereas January 6^th only caused an estimated $2.73 million in property damages – an estimate that is likely on the higher end given the deep state’s interest in solemnizing that day as a national tragedy for posterity, in the same vein as Pearl Harbor or September 11th – that figure represents just a mere fraction, or 0.135%, of the $1-$2 billion in damages caused by the George Floyd riots. To make matters worse, whereas the national media christened the events of January 6^th with the historically and legally inapposite label, “insurrection,” the media also vowed that despite the burning and looting and arson that was broadcast into millions of American living rooms for the entire summer, all the riots emerging from George Floyd’s death were spontaneously organic and “mostly peaceful,” observable reality be damned. (As for the events of January 6^th, 2021, which the mainstream media labeled an insurrection, that was yet another disingenuous narrative. Indeed, to even suggest that the protest of that day was insurrectionary renders grave harm to the real concept, whose real definition amounts to a serious challenge to the regnant order currently in power. As will be discussed in greater detail below, given what we now know in light of all the information that has come out on Ray Epps and other government agents undoubtedly interspersed throughout the crowds on Capitol grounds that day, who were working on behalf of the national intelligence agencies to foment rioting, a very strong case could be made that the federal government itself forged a legally operative conspiracy against the American people.)

The term “insurrection” was in all likelihood deliberately and intentionally chosen by the media, working in tandem with federal agents, to tee up the charges that were anticipated – and later did – arise, as seen in this round of indictments by Jack Smith’s office, supplementing the individual state indictments in Georgia and New York. In other words, the end result was preplanned from the very start; support for this is found not only in the tons of circumstantial evidence of federal agents who instigated the protestors on Capitol grounds, but moreover, in the direct evidence of the extensive preparation that we now know went into the January 6^th event by federal agents and other government officials. There is plenty of evidence that has come to light supporting the view that federal agents had for a while been planning for the protest on January 6^th, which is not only supported in everything we have learned about Ray Epps’ particular case, but in the cases of other likely federal agents who maliciously targeted high-profile January 6th victims who appeared on Capitol grounds that day, in order to coax those protestors into inciting violence to better sell the “insurrection” narrative to the public. 

What I just described, however, does not even get to the heart of the matter. The greatest anomaly of the 2020 general election was the political context in which the election took place: COVID-19 reset the entire paradigm. One can easily forget that in December of 2019, prior to the first reported outbreak of the pandemic on American shores, the Trump economy was raging, unemployment was at historic lows across every demographic group, global terrorism was at decades lows, and America’s future looked quite bright. Accordingly, before the pandemic hit, Trump, despite overcoming the ridiculous Mueller investigation and being in the midst of the first of two equally ridiculous impeachments, both of which Trump was later acquitted by the Senate (in accordance with the Constitutional procedure under Art. II, Sec. 4), was nevertheless poised for a resounding victory come 2020. Then, everything changed. The vast majority of states radically changed their election procedures – beyond anything previously seen in American history – using the justification of national emergency, which deeply complicated the process of counting votes. Such changes included switching to “universal mail voting” – which the Left sold to the public as a “civil rights issue” adding a veneer of moral propriety to make it easier for them to affect (read: steal) the outcome of the election.

The fact that so many states, such as Nevada and Vermont, made these changes permanent proves that civil rights was never the driving issue; these changes were always about maintaining power, which the Left accomplished with remarkable alacrity. The result of these changes meant “that millions more Americans will receive mail ballots in future elections,” as reported by Politico. The influx of new ballots (which must be distinguished from new voters; it remains an open question whether each ballot can be connected to a real person. Because the Left shut down all conversation on the subject – indeed, making it criminal to question the integrity of our elections, contrary to the First Amendment, that inquiry will unfortunately remain unresolved so long as the Left retains power), which was done under the absurd excuse of “safety,” has deeply muddled the waters and sowed permanent doubts about the integrity of all future elections. 

As it stood, prior to the pandemic, the integrity of our elections has been put into serious doubt over years by Democrats and Republicans alike. Before 2020, election integrity was mostly a Democratic boilerplate issue: the results of the 2000 and 2016 presidential elections, in particular, were seriously undermined by Democratic lawmakers and their media allies who in many cases outright denied the legitimacy of both elections. In 2016, many leading Democrats, incredulous over the thought of Donald Trump winning the 2016 election, also discussed the possibility of sending alternate electors or supporting so-called “faithless” electors, even going as far as signing onto an attempt to sully the electors fight on the grounds that the Electoral College is a “deliberative process.” Then, the Left had no shame in sowing doubts about the integrity of the election process and the legitimacy of the Trump presidency. After all, the Left and their henchmen in the media conjured a false narrative about Russian influence in the 2016 election, to which the American people were subject nonstop for the entire first half of the time Trump was in office.

According to the Durham report, “neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community Appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.” It was the Crossfire Hurricane investigation launched on July 31, 2016, in the middle of the Presidential election, that established the legal imprimatur for the Obama FBI to wiretap the Trump campaign. The 2020 election was carried out in the most polarized political climate since 1860. Because of our deeply polarized state of affairs, the election results were bound to be close, either way. So the fact that Trump’s administration wanted to exercise its due diligence – in light of how close our presidential elections are, including in 2020, which was decided by a mere 50,000 votes spread across a handful of states – was completely reasonable.

Indeed, had Trump not made inquiries into the integrity of the election it would have been an act of grave negligence. His phone calls, for example, to the Georgia Governor, and his demands to the Georgia Secretary of State, for which he is now ridiculously being investigated, and state legislatures in critical battlegrounds, like Michigan and Wyoming, is not an impeachable or indictable offense: it is an act of precautionary care, the type of action one would expect a President to carry out to meet his constitutional oath: indeed, the highest form of patriotism.

The words President Trump chose to communicate to Brian Kemp are far, far less important constitutionally speaking than the act itself, which was motivated by sincere worries about the legalities of the 2020 election, and out of an abundance of concern to uphold his Article II, Section 3 duty: “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” The first line of Article II stipulates that “the executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Donald Trump, as President of the United States, therefore had a constitutional prerogative to ensure the integrity of the electoral process. 

That dozens and dozens of states changed their election procedures during an extraordinarily precarious moment in American history would indeed necessitate the kinds of actions, at a bare minimum, that Trump undertook in the days following the 2020 election, in order to meet his oath. Here are just a handful of examples: 

• Florida’s voter registration deadline was extended.

• Pennsylvania provided for prepaid postage for mail-in and absentee ballots. The state also extended the deadline for mail-in/absentee ballots, and authorized dropbox access for the collection of such ballots.

• Arizona’s voter registration deadline was extended.

• Michigan sent mail-in ballot applications “automatically” to all voters for the general election.

• Maine extended its voter pre-registration deadline for the general election.

• Wisconsin automatically sent mail-in ballots to most voters for the general election.

The above partial list, which names just a handful of prominent swing states, only touches again the tip of the iceberg of the monumental, historic, and unprecedented changes that were unlawfully implemented by state legislatures across the country to make ballot harvesting and voting generally easier (which is to say, more susceptible to corruption) in the lead-up to the 2020 election. And this list excuses deep blue states like California and New York, which made such radical changes to its voting laws – including authorizing counties to “consolidate polling places”; extending the eligibility for mail-in ballots to any person deemed unable to personally appear at the polling place because of a risk of contracting COVID; and opening “online portals” to request absentee ballots, among other revolutionary changes that made voting easier and thus significantly more vulnerable to fraud. Indeed, one can reasonably argue that the procedures themselves, of highly dubious legality again, were prima facie fraudulent. And this neglects the hundreds if not thousands of other arbitrary rule-changes made nationwide on a state-by-state basis, such as mask-wearing requirements and other unprecedented, last-minute rule changes implemented in numerous states with the clear and undeniable purpose of maximizing Biden voters and minimizing Trump voters. 

In a country of this size under normal conditions, the changes discussed above would typically require years to properly implement in order to guarantee their efficacy. But the goal of electioneering in this country is no longer one of minimizing corruption to ensure a fair, orderly, and competent process – producing outcomes that every American can confidently rally around. Instead, its purpose has been reverse engineered to now sow as much confusion in the process as humanly possible, making election procedures so complicated – and the thought of conducting proper discovery in a would-be lawsuit so time consuming and arduous – that it has tragically rendered irreparable damage to the legitimacy of the entire system.

Free and fair elections, much like equitable justice, is a foreign concept in a banana republic. The expedited timeline by which the 2020 general election procedures were changed in the name of national security, much as the timeline for the COVID-19 vaccine, which should have taken years, even decades, before being mass adopted, was sped up to mere months, is the ultimate testimony of a society that does not care any longer for competence or fairness or democratic governance, or for putting the interests of its own voters first. Instead, it is testimony of a regime that sinks lower and lower by the day into the abyss of unmanageable corruption, a largely self-inflicted wound that is the ultimate telltale of its growing impotence.

A slightly modified version of this piece under a different title was also published at The American Mind, and can be found here.

Paul Ingrassia is a Law Clerk at The McBride Law Firm, PLLC. He graduated from Cornell Law School in 2022 and is on the Board of Advisors of the New York Young Republican Club. He was also a two-time Claremont Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @PaulIngrassia, Substack, and Rumble.

Olivia Ingrassia is a 2021 Claremont Publius Fellow and a current law student in New York City. She previously worked on the Trump Victory field team in 2020. Follow her on Twitter @OliviaIngrassia.