AMERICAN POLITICS IN THE AGE OF TRUMP

Have We Reached Peak MAGA?

Part One: The Surrender of Sydney Powell

The evidence continues to accumulate that the Trump movement, and the Republican Party, are in failure mode. Although there will always be a place for a Conservative party in American politics, the collapse of Donald Trump and the extremist MAGA movement is so extensive that this year is likely to go down in history as the high-water mark of Trumpism, with nothing waiting in the wings to replace it. Republicans — real Republicans, not MAGAts — have been pushed far enough. They are looking for a path to save their Party, rescue the institutions of government, and save American democracy. They have several options that can meet their need. Which path they will choose remains open. But Trump, and the worst of the extremists, are on the way out.

The accumulating evidence is too extensive for a single essay. It includes (but is not limited to):

• The surrender of Sydney Powell
• The failure of Jim Jordan
• The collapse of the Trump business empire
• The muzzling of Donald Trump
• The revolt of the institutionalists in the Republican Party
• The prosecution of the January 6th insurrectionists
• The imminent imprisonment of Donald Trump
• The lack of a viable alternative to lead the Trump Cult

To make the narrative easier to follow, I will focus on each of these in turn in separate essays. Part one focuses on the surrender of Sydney Powell.

The surrender of Sydney Powell

Nineteen persons, including Donald Trump, were charged by Atlanta District Attorney Fani Willis in an Atlanta courtroom for violations of Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. The Georgia RICO Act, while based on a similar Federal law, is written more broadly. While the federal act requires an extended pattern of crime by multiple individuals through a criminal enterprise, under the Georgia Act only one individual may be enough to constitute a criminal enterprise. In addition, the enterprise as a whole must commit only two interrelated crimes towards a common goal and include a wider range of underlying crimes than the federal act. While nineteen individuals were charged, it is possible to use the testimony of any or all of the people in the plot to get a conviction of the most senior head of the enterprise — in this case, Donald Trump. The Georgia DA has greater discretion than a Federal DA to make deals with any or all of the subordinate participants in a corrupt organization to nail the man at the top.

Violation of the act is a felony, which in Georgia provides for a prison term of 5–20 years; a fine of three times the amount of money gained from the criminal activity, but no less than $25,000; or both.

Three of the defendants — Scott Hall, Kenneth Chesebro, and Sydney Powell, exercised their right to a speedy trial. Perhaps they thought the DA would not be prepared to go to trial by the end of the month. In the case of Hall, the prospect of high and mounting legal bills might have led him to take this action. If they believed DA Willis wasn’t prepared to go to trial, they were wrong. If they thought their pretrial motions would derail the trial, they were badly mistaken. Whatever their motives, with the deadline approaching, these people began to face the immediate prospect of prison time. As a result, confessions are piling up, and each plea deal turns the defendants against those who are above them in the conspiracy.

The first was bail bondsman Scott Hall. Hall was a relatively minor operator involved in accessing and copying election software in Coffee County, Georgia, a rural district about two hours south of Atlanta. By himself, he is a relatively trivial character, but he was in direct communication and cooperating with Kenneth Chesebro, a Harvard-trained attorney who had helped the Democrats argue the case of Bush v. Gore before the Supreme Court that decided the election of 2000.

Kenneth Chesebro

Chesebro, who has since come into a fortune through Bitcoin speculation and was always attracted to the centers of power, changed sides. Perhaps he learned the wrong lessons after witnessing the dirty tricks of Roger Stone, a Republican political operative who had arranged fake “riots” to disrupt vote counts in Florida. Stone, whose first “dirty trick” was to influence an in-class ballot between Kennedy and Nixon when he was eight years old, moved on to serve every Republican presidential candidate from Nixon through Trump, as well as establishing connections with the Russian secret service to influence the Trump elections of 2016 and 2020.

Jury selection was scheduled for Monday. On Friday, Kenneth Chesebro pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to file false documents in the case, receiving a penalty of five years’ probation, 100 hours of community service, and a small financial penalty. When Chesebro admitted to his role in Georgia, he was admitting to playing a part in a larger scheme of submitting fraudulent slates of electors in several states to Congress.

According to Chesebro’s lawyer, the one who accepted the plea deal, “Mr. Chesebro never believed in ‘the Big Lie.’”

“If you ask Mr. Chesebro today who won the 2020 presidential election, he would say Joe Biden.”

According to his indictment, one memo Chesebro wrote “provides detailed, state-specific instructions for how Trump presidential elector nominees in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin would meet and cast electoral votes” for Trump, although he lost the election in those states. That memo is now in the hands of the District Attorney.

Chesebro’s case was scheduled to be the first to come before a jury. To avoid that, Chesebro pleaded guilty to a felony. In return to an agreement that he was not the “architect” of the fake elector's scheme, to stay out of prison he accepted the end of his career as an attorney. Despite the slant attempted by his lawyer, the evidence in the case —evidence placed into the record in the proffered deal in order for the District Attorney to accept it — must be sufficiently damning that Willis was willing to let the smaller fish go in order to bag the larger. If Chesebro wasn’t the architect, who was?

Sydney Powell

Perhaps it was the defendant who turned state’s evidence on Thursday. Sydney Powell, a Dallas-based lawyer, became an attorney to Donald Trump after gaining his favor by publishing several think pieces claiming that Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s dealings with Russia was an effort to undermine him in the 2020 election. Later, while claiming that Georgia Governor Brian Kemp had been “bribed by an election systems company,” she herself tampered with voting machines in Coffee County, Georgia in an attempt to change the results of that election.

You remember Sydney Powell. She’s been a daily presence in the news for years, making groundless claims that led to a lawsuit that cost Fox News millions of dollars. Appearing on Newsmax on Nov. 17, Powell said she had a video showing Dominion Voting Machines founder John Poulos bragging, “I can change a million votes, no problem at all.” The video did not exist.

At a press conference with Rudy Giuliani and others, Powell said Dominion had been “created in Venezuela by Hugo Chavez to make sure he never lost an election.” She said the machines had an algorithm that automatically flipped votes, and that George Soros’ “№2 person” was “one of the leaders of the Dominion project.” Also false. — Mona Charen (2021)

Here’s what happened when Australian public television asked Ms. Powell to confirm basic facts:

Powell and the RICO prosecution

Sydney Powell was charged by the Fulton County District Attorney with seven felonies. On Thursday, one day before jury selection was to begin in her trial, she also made a deal with prosecutors that would allow her to avoid jail time. In exchange, she admitted six misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference in the performance of election officials in the 2020 election. As a result of her plea deal, she

• was sentenced to six years probation
• agreed to pay a fine of $6000
• agreed to pay $2700 restitution to the state of Georgia
• turned over documents related to the crime
• agreed to testify truthfully against her co-defendants in their forthcoming trials

Powell would not receive this deal unless she had already turned over the documents and recorded a statement that can be used in future trials in the event she is not available to fulfill her bargain.

Trump has been planning to assert attorney-client privilege as a key element of his defense in Georgia. In the best of circumstances, this is a difficult defense to mount. In order for it to succeed, an “affirmative defense” requires him to prove two things:

• He relied in good faith on the advice of his lawyer that his conduct was legal, and
• He had made a full disclosure of all relevant facts to the attorney before he received that advice

To have any chance of pulling this off, Trump would need consistent, overlapping trial testimony of both the attorney and himself, plus the admission into evidence of any documents reflecting the communications or advice related to the charge.

Now, with Powell on the other side, the hopes of Trump and all co-conspirators above her in the scheme are sliding downhill to oblivion.

Moreover, Powell, even more than Chesebro, was near the center of the plot. When the New York Times reported on the nineteen people charged in the Atlanta RICO case (along with several others who were also named as co-conspirators by the Grand Jury but not prosecuted), Sidney Powell was near the top of the list. This is confirmed by the detailed list of co-conspirators named in the Federal indictment of Donald Trump. A quick review of where she fits in the conspiracy:

• Donald Trump
• Rudy Giuliani
• John Eastman
• Sidney Powell
• Jeffrey Clark
• Kenneth Chesebro

RICO cases start at the bottom of an organization. They turn the soldiers, offering plea deals in exchange for testimony that will convict the ringleaders. With Chesebro and Powell’s defections, the path to the top of the Trump 2020 Plot is shrinking.

What Powell is offering

Powell was present in a raucous December 18th, 2020 meeting in the White House that nearly turned into a fistfight between former national security Michael Flynn and Trump’s then-White House lawyer Eric Herschmann. Herschmann recounted to the January 6th Committee that Trump had invited several fringe players to his office to give him a rationale and a plan to remain in office despite losing the election.

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) has called this meeting “critical” since it was where Trump witnessed as his own advisors shot down, one by one, the false theories of election fraud “nuts.” Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to Trump’s chief of staff, texted “The West Wing is UNHINGED” to her boss as she watched the meeting as it happened in front of her. Trump was presented with a draft executive order to appoint Powell as a special council and order the Defense Department to seize voting machines.

Powell was at the center of the argument. Now she has admitted that she knew it was a lie. And while no paperwork was ever filed, Powell later testified that she thought Trump had agreed to her plans.

Powell is also an unindicted co-conspirator in the Federal case being prosecuted by special counsel Jack Smith. While there is no evidence that Powell is required to testify in Smith’s election fraud case, it would be easy to put pressure on her to do so.

Trump, true to form, denies he ever had anything to do with her. Unfortunately, he tweets constantly, and his words follow him.

It’s not good for Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic that allies of the president defamed them, but it may turn out to be good for the country that the victims availed themselves of their legal remedies. Unlike most people who face Trump in court, they have pockets deep enough to persevere through Trump’s delaying tactics. And since the lies were central to the reputation on which their business is based, they refused to settle for anything less than victory: Fox agreed to pay Dominion $787.5 million, believed to be the largest defamation settlement in U.S. history by a media organization. Fox also released a statement saying, in part, “We acknowledge the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.”

The series of lawsuits Powell has already been involved in has restored the standard that there is a difference between dirty tricks and negative campaigning. The latter may be offensive but it is based on something that has an element of truth, as opposed to dirty tricks — something that is a wholesale fabrication.

In the Dominion voting machine case, Powell tried to claim that she made a series of lies about the election being stolen, but because she was clearly speaking in a political context, her comments must be construed as standard political exaggeration. Her argument was that any factual claim, no matter how false, is insulated from consequences under defamation law if it is connected to politics. Any politically motivated lie is fine. Furthermore, the very outlandishness of her lies was made part of her defense. Sure, she acknowledged, she had said “Democrats were attempting to steal the election and had developed a computer system to alter votes electronically.” But “no reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact.” The great lie that poisoned American politics and inspired a violent attack on the Capitol was so stupid that “no reasonable person would believe it.”

What does that statement say about the people who, to this day, refuse to accept that Biden won the election?

It’s about the complete abdication of integrity by leaders on the right — Republican officeholders, conservative opinion leaders, right-wing TV and so forth. At first they countered Trump’s lies. Soon after, they began to avoid them. Next, they pretended to find them amusing. Then they shrugged. Finally, they joined. When enough people in authority tell lies, they cripple their audience’s capacity for reason. — Mona Charon (2021)

Now Sydney Powell, at the end of her legal rope, is exercising the better part of valor and turning on her patron. Powell’s testimony is sufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Donald Trump is guilty of heading a plot to rob the American people of their right to elect their leaders. In some sense, his plot is a furtherance of long-standing antidemocratic trends built by both parties into the American electoral system. But it is a step too far to throw away any election that doesn’t go your way.

Trump allies, faced with prison, are turning on him. He can deny knowing them, but as he circles the wagons only he (and perhaps a few who are truly insane) remain in the circle. When that happens, the circle begins to look more like a noose.