This is a Crime

A slew of news organizations have now confirmed that this morning President Trump called Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) and asked him to convince the state legislature to overturn the results of the election. Kemp refused. (Trump makes weird heroes.) We need to understand that these are literally crimes. I don’t mean moral lapses or things that are wrong. They’re crimes. If I call up someone at the Board of Elections in New York and try to convince them to change the vote numbers or throw away ballots, that’s a crime. I would certainly be charged with a crime. Their saying no doesn’t absolve me of the crime. It’s no defense. The higher up you are on the totem pole the graver a crime it becomes because your chances of success are far greater. Again, these are crimes.

We’ve become numbed to it because it’s the President, because it’s become routine, because it seems desperate and ridiculous. But failure is not a defense.

We put people in prison for sharing state secrets for foreign governments. We do the same for sharing military plans. This is treated as utterly unremarkable. It’s a basic issue of national security. But the security of the state itself, the republic is the core of national security. This is not my opinion of relative importance. It’s the official position of the government itself. No officer of the United States government or its subsidiary jurisdictions swears an allegiance to the nation, or its territorial integrity or anything else. They swear it to the constitution.

But again, we don’t have to get all highfalutin about the constitution: asking a public official to change the results of an election is a crime. There’s no legal argument here. This isn’t legal under Georgia law. It’s a crime. Just because you butter it up with a bunch of freedom and constitution talk, it’s still a crime.