A defendant is on trial for murdering his parents. He asks for leniency from the court because, hey, he is an orphan! This Yiddish joke has served as the definition of “chutzpah” for a few hundred years. But thanks to the lawfare tricksters, we have a new explanation for the word.
On July 31, 2023, Andrew Weissman and Ryan Goodman, writing at Just Security, published an article predicting that the Special Counsel would charge Donald Trump with violating 18 U.S.C. §241 (“Conspiracy against rights”) and 18 U.S. Code §1512 (“Tampering with a witness, victim, or an informant”) based on events on January 6, 2021—specifically, the electoral college vote count in the Senate.
Indeed, then-President Trump did speak and tweet that the vote count should be stopped. However, he was responding to, not committing, a crime—the crime being possible election fraud and a subsequent cover-up. Prosecuting Trump was a chutzpahdik continuation of the same wrongdoing.
On election night 2020, the networks reported various stoppages of the vote count in various swing states. There were reports of stoppages in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Dekalb County, Georgia; and North Carolina. There were also questions about “frozen” return numbers in Wisconsin and Michigan. Most infamously, the lead election officials in the Fulton County Stadium in Atlanta seemed to have stopped their count when they sent other officials home on the specious justification of a non-existent water leak.
It was the stoppages that were the catalyst for all the election controversies that plague us to this day. Without those stoppages, Trump would never have held a press conference where, at 2:21 am, he stated that “all of a sudden it [the counting] is off” and then, at 2:29 am, that “we want all voting to stop; we don’t want them to find any ballots in the morning and add them.”
In fact, those stoppages were illegal, and, therefore, the votes counted afterward were arguably voidable or even void. South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Nevada, inter alia, had explicit language in their election statutes forbidding stopping the count—assumedly, for the obvious reason that stoppages provide great opportunity for cheating.
For example, Pennsylvania’s §1222 states, “…The election officers shall forthwith proceed to canvass and compute the votes cast, and shall not adjourn or postpone the canvass or computation until it shall have been fully completed.” (Emphasis added.)
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