Ann Coulter's most recent Substack post begins, "As much as I'm enjoying the January 6th committee's careful assembly of evidence proving President Trump is a douchebag, I wasn't seeing much in the way of a criminal offense until this week's underreported story about how Trump used his 'STOP THE STEAL' fundraising appeals to grift his supporters . . . ."
Not sure whether I should feel queasy or validated about agreeing with Ann Coulter on the fundamentals of Trump's character. But, regarding the former president's criminal exposure, she might want to consult with some legal beagles who are pretty sure Trump violated multiple federal statutes by, for example, pressuring Pence not to perform his constitutional duties on 6 January 2021. There is also the fact that federal judge David Carter, in an order directing Trump attorney John Eastman to turn over documents to the congressional committee investigating J6, wrote that the evidence in his records case persuaded him that Trump "more likely than not" committed crimes related to the effort to block or delay the certification of electoral votes. The grifting is actually a kind of sidelight that, however revelatory of Trump's character, seems in the scheme of things roughly analogous to another of his consiglieres, Rudy Giuliani, complaining bitterly that in fact he (Giuliani) hadn't been smashed (when advising Trump to get along with the coup).
Coulter's article is mainly about Dinesh D'Souza's movie "2000 Mules," which I'd heard about without, however, learning any details. Apparently D'Souza obtained cell phone tracking records that either have persuaded him (if he's a moron) or given him a pretext to assert (if he's vile) that there's proof the election was stolen from Trump when, as Coulter summarizes, "2000 people delivered multiple ballots to election drop boxes in the five crucial battleground states that Trump lost.” Coulter does a decent job of dismantling this absurd claim by pointing out, among other things, that D'Souza's cell phone records do not distinguish between mailmen and "mules." She might also have mentioned that, in general, claims of suspicious doings in the battleground states should be measured against what happened in the country as a whole. I'd bet my first 20 social security checks that, had a disinterested investigator gotten cell phone records around counting stations in San Francisco and Laramie, he would have detected the same kind of "suspicious" activity that D'Souza claims to have uncovered in "the crucial battleground states." The whole bit about cell phone tracking is just meant to give a veneer of techie prestige to bullshit. Nothing was going on in the battleground states that wasn't going on in the whole country—the widely reported election results show this. Trump lost to Clinton by 2.1 percent, then to Biden by 4.5 percent. So a 2.4 percent movement away from Trump, enough to turn the narrowly decided "battlegrounds" from red to blue. Trump went backwards by two or three or four percent in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan and also by two or three or four percent in Indiana, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, Virginia, both Dakotas, Tennessee, Alabama, Washington, Kentucky, Maryland, and most other states I haven't mentioned.
But there were "mules" in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania!
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