Foul Trump election probe slapped down by old-time conservative

Sure, the effort is to largely assuage his maniacal ego and excuse the embarrassing “L” on his record. But moreso, it appears to be part of an orchestrated scheme to throw doubt into the upcoming fall elections which look like they’ll be brutal to Team MAGA.

David Walbert, a veteran Atlanta election attorney, sees this as Trump poisoning the well to “get people ready for what he’s about to do.”

Fulton records, and others seized by the FBI, will be used to claim fraud in an attempt to hang on to the House and/or Senate.

“When they lose elections, they’ll have a database and then they’ll have some BS expert using this data to allege fraud,” said Walbert, author of the upcoming book “Stealing Elections, American Style.”

The book details American electoral connivance going back 150 years. Walbert said the current “investigation” is an extension of Trump’s 2020 playbook, when he tried to have GOP legislators throw out electors for Joe Biden.

Credit: Hyosub Shin, hshin@ajc.com

Credit: Hyosub Shin, hshin@ajc.com

“If election deniers create a dispute over who won, or election officials simply say the results are uncertain because of ‘questions of fraud,’ ‘irregularities’ or for any other justification, the House or Senate will decide who to seat,” Walbert wrote of the upcoming election. “And there is no doubt who today’s House and Senate would seat if there is any dispute.”

“For instance, if you take Fulton County out (of the state’s vote totals by questioning its legitimacy) then (Democratic Sen.) Jon Ossoff probably can’t win,” Walbert told me. “It can get pretty ugly.”

Politics and elections are already grotesque and, of course, can get worse, especially since Trump II is larded with patsies afraid to dissuade the president from his worst instincts.

Thankfully, there are still some out there not afraid to push back against this misuse of power.

U.S District Court Judge William Ray this week smacked down the Trump DOJ’s effort to obtain names and personal information for thousands of Fulton election workers and volunteers.

It was a stinging rebuke from a federal judge in quashing a criminal grand jury subpoena sought by prosecutors.

The subpoena, filed in April, was seen as a ploy to harass and intimidate employees and throw another plate of spaghetti against the wall. Trump and his minions want to confuse and instill doubt with the public, to give a sense that “there must be something there if they’re investigating.”

Ray called the DOJ request an “arbitrary fishing expedition.”

Credit: David Goldman

Credit: David Goldman

The judge noted there is a five-year statute of limitations on any possible crimes committed in connection with the 2020 election, so any possible prosecution is moot.

“The DOJ cannot evade the statute of limitations based merely on a theory that someone, somewhere, somehow did something that was illegal,” Ray wrote in his order.

Now, Ray is no radical, left-wing whacko, or whatever Trumps calls those who rule against him. He’s a former tough-on-crime GOP state senator nominated to the bench by Trump in 2017.

That was when Trump still picked normal, reasonable Republicans.

The prosecutor heading this case is Dan Bishop, a U.S. Attorney from North Carolina. As a congressman, he helped spread Trump’s lies after the 2020 election and was one of the 147 GOP House members who voted against certifying Biden as president. Fittingly, he was appointed to oversee election “integrity” investigations across the U.S.

Bishop told me he couldn’t comment on the case.

But the DOJ said: “The district court’s ruling that the probable expiration of statutes of limitations prevents the grand jury from investigating the 2020 election in Georgia is at odds with numerous holdings of the Supreme Court.”

Judge Ray noted the strain the DOJ’s fishing expedition would place on a large county trying to conduct elections, that workers and volunteers might feel intimidated and melt away. He even mentioned Ruby Freeman, the elections worker who was named by Rudy Giuliani during a Georgia Senate hearing in 2020 on false claims of fraud.

Freeman was intimidated, even having wingnuts banging on her front door. She later won a lawsuit against Giuliani.

In his ruling, Judge Ray sprinkled in a little civics lesson — with a warning.

“Everyone, whether you support the president or you do not, or whether you believe the 2020 election was fair or believe that it was not,” he wrote, “should be concerned about the DOJ’s ability to utilize the power of the grand jury to appropriate your private information without a legitimate purpose. ”

The judge knows politics, as well as taking a tough stand. Billy Ray grew up on a Middle Georgia farm and his family was in the political game: One uncle was a state rep, another was a congressman. Ray once headed Gwinnett’s GOP.

He walked out on a limb in 2001 and was one of only six Senate Republicans who voted to remove the Confederate symbol from Georgia’s state flag. That move helped cost Gov. Roy Barnes his job. But Ray never found out if it would have deep-sixed him. He was appointed as a Gwinnett County judge before he had to run again.

I figure he was once a pol, came from a political family and can smell political dung a barnyard away.

Hopefully, there are more out there like him.