Villainy Abides

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

“Sometimes things are happening that are bigger than what the headline flow suggests.”

- Tom Luongo, Gold, Goats and Guns

The Party of Victims (a.k.a., the Democratic Party), the so far designated “winners” of the midterm election, spent the past week talking smack to the country about how they aim to go after the president and everyone in his cabinet. . . impeachment-o-rama. . .persecutions. . . a veritable Grand Guignol of Jacobin-style political bloodletting in the next Congress – until Mr. Blanche, the attorney general, had to remind them that such an agenda seemed to lack legislative purpose, implying that this is how punks talk.

Chatter overheard out of the White House bespeaks a hearty debate about how to handle these garish threats. Does the president try to play nice with such a pack of rabid animals? Or is it time for Mr. Trump to channel his inner Harry Callahan? You must think the answer is self-evident, but it kind of turns on what reputable detectives can discern about the propriety of the election that put them in Congress, or lack of such.

You could not contrive a more excessively convoluted balloting process than our fifty states of the union have come up with. The many complex layers between registration, casting, and counting of ballots, plus the intervention of computerized tabulation machines, scream of vast openings to manipulation and fraud. There are many sound theories about what happened this time to produce such a suspiciously uniform “blue shift” in so many places with stark regional and demographic differences, from Mississippi to Minnesota.

And, of course, the basic numbers have a fishy bouquet: Nationwide, Republicans were down about 5-million votes from the previous midterm and Democrats ended about 15-million votes up. Many suspect there is a correlation between the huge Democratic Party increase and the fact that some 20-million illegal immigrants were allowed to rush the border under the sketchy regime of “Joe Biden,” given Social Security cards and driver’s licenses, and nicely prepped to pretend to be US citizens.

The Democratic Party has a designated election field marshal, one Marc Elias, attorney-at-lawfare, devoted to the scientific gaming of our hyper-complex election procedures, plus help from scores of well-funded NGOs to provide muscle in his field operations, which entailed materializing hordes of new voters, many of them non-citizens and others completely made-up, fake. Was AI used to assemble all those new voters out of state rolls that included the dead, and voters who had moved to other states? And then, were nefarious algorithms at work to engineer outcomes in those states’ tabulation machines?

You might suppose that aside from the appointment of Stephen Miller as the new chief of staff, Mr. Trump has appeared strangely flaccid the past ten days in the face of what might have been a meticulously staged coup. Well, this is what you do when you watch your enemy maneuver in this battle-space. The first order of business is to establish whether there was any mischief in the voting apparatus.

Executive Order 13848 designates the ODNI to conduct an investigation on foreign interference in the vote and report to the president in 45 days after the election – meaning the week before Christmas. All the intel agencies in the executive branch are available to investigate: the FBI, CIA, DOW-Intel, Homeland Security, Treasury, etc., a swarm of very sophisticated crime detection, surely aided by AI.

Under their regular duties, beyond EO 13848, the agencies are not limited to looking for foreign interference. Where federal elections are involved – House and Senate seats – and probable cause exists, the FBI and DHS especially can investigate homegrown fraud and report criminal referrals to the attorney general at the DOJ.

The DOJ can move to prosecute state officials for federal crimes such as 18 U.S.C. § 241 (conspiracy against rights) and § 242 (deprivation of rights under color of law). 52 U.S.C. §§ 10307(c), 10307(e) and related Voting Rights Act criminal provisions cover false information in registration or voting, multiple voting, and related conspiracies when a federal candidate is on the ballot. 52 U.S.C. § 20511 also provides for fraudulent registration or related acts. State officials enjoy no general immunity from federal prosecution for violating these laws. The Supremacy Clause ensures that valid federal criminal statutes apply to state officers when the elements are met.

Under the Constitution, however, in contested elections, when January 3 rolls around, the old Congress officially ceases to exist and the new Congress ultimately can decide to seat itself without first being seated. Say, what. . . ? Try to imagine the scene where the election results have been discredited in several states, and dozens of state officials are subject to prosecution for election fraud – on top of the discovery, reported to the president by the DNI, that China, Cuba, and perhaps elements in and around the EU interfered in the midterm election. . . and Hakeem Jeffries gavels in the 120th Congress despite all that. Does it sound like a recipe for crisis to you? And all because Senator John Thune could not find a way to pass the SAVE Act in the many months after the House passed it in April and sent it to him. Villainy abides.

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