RUTHFULLY YOURS

• “As President, I have no higher duty than to defend the laws and the Constitution of the United States. That is why I am determined to protect our election system, which is now under coordinated assault and siege”. — President Donald J. Trump, December 2, 2020.
• “The top line here is very simple: [Many people] used a coordinated strategy across six battleground states — you’ve got Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — a coordinated strategy to stuff the ballot box with mail-in and absentee ballots, and do it in a way where they bend and often break the law…” — Peter Navarro, regarding his report, “An Indecent Exposure,” Newsmax, December 21, 2020.
• There are accusations that many politicians in America are not even slightly interested in fair elections or equal justice under law — only about attaining power and keeping it in perpetuity.
• “Make no mistake: voter fraud is real. [Many people], the media and the so-called public interest groups on the political Left will tell you otherwise, but they are either lying or totally ignorant. Voter fraud is a threat to the integrity of our elections, the heart of our democracy—and [many people] want to make the problem worse with their new voting laws.” — Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, Newsweek, June 7, 2020.
• The evidence gathered is available to be seen. That judges dismissed lawsuits without seeing it does not make it disappear.
• Many commentators apparently accept the idea that Biden will soon be president and resign themselves to it. Others apparently have decided that accepting so much lawlessness is unacceptable. It could, they assess, undermine American democracy, fatally erode American institutions, and plummet the country into an authoritarian future, foreign or domestic, and economic ruin.
• “Weak-kneed [politicians],” columnist Charlie Eastman wrote, “who choose to wave the white flag instead of fighting to the last man to challenge the fraud that occurred in the 2020 election are committing political suicide”.

November 3, 2020. New York. Midnight. A reporter on television said that election vote counting had been stopped in several states. At this point, President Donald J. Trump seemed in a position to win and easily to have a second term. Commenting a bit later, he said, “We did win,” but added a warning: “We don’t want them to find any ballot at four o clock in the morning”. By morning, everything had changed. Thousands more ballots had appeared. States where Trump had a clear lead displayed different results. Former Vice President Joe Biden appeared to have won.

Three days later, on November 7, Biden delivered a victory speech. Trump repeated, “I won this election”. He added, “by a lot”.

Over the next weeks, lawyers with the Trump campaign talked about massive fraud, gathered evidence, collected affidavits and expert analysis. Public hearings were organized in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Michigan. Lawsuits were launched, and files prepared and presented to judges. Almost all the judges dismissed the lawsuits even before the evidence could be heard.

On December 8, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against the states of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin with the US Supreme Court. Paxton, with 18 states joining Texas as “friends of the court”, said that those four states had made changes to voting rules and procedures through the courts or executive actions instead of making the changes through the state legislatures, as required by the US Constitution, and were therefore diluting the lawful votes cast in other states. On December 11, the Supreme Court, rather than addressing the merits of the case, dismissed the complaint for “lack of standing”. They said that in their view, a state has no right (standing) to disagree with the sovereign decision of another state and, furthermore, that Texas could not demonstrate that actual harm (a tort) had been done to anyone.

“Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections”, the Supreme Court obfuscatorally wrote in an unsigned ruling. Only Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito were interested in at least seeing the evidence: “We do not have discretion to deny the filing of a bill of complaint in a case that falls within our original jurisdiction”.

In fairness, according to both the Federalist Papers and the Constitution, the courts play no role in elections. That privilege is reserved for states’ legislatures and the Congress. Regrettably, only one — quite shattering — hearing on election “irregularities” took place, on December 16, under the impressive leadership of Senator Ron Johnson.

Senator Josh Hawley, Representative Mo Brooks and an increasing number of members of Congress have now called for another hearing on January 6, with the intent to challenge the results of the Electoral College vote in Pennsylvania and possibly six other states — Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and the Third District of South Carolina, where massive “irregularities” — the preferred euphemism for election fraud — have appeared. These include allegations that the voting machines are able to be hacked in real time and had been rejected in 2019 by [politicians] such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who warned about “security problems”. Many of these “irregularities” have been documented, in his private capacity as a citizen, by the noted economist and current Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy at the White House, Peter Navarro. His 36-page report, “The Immaculate Deception,” released on December 20, was immediately disparaged by many in the media.

In it, Navarro precisely details the kinds of fraud that took place on November 3. After referring to countless documents, Navarro concludes that “if the fraudulent votes were removed, it would become clear that Trump won”. In an interview he added:

“The top line here is very simple: [Many people] used a coordinated strategy across six battleground states — you’ve got Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — a coordinated strategy to stuff the ballot box with mail-in and absentee ballots, and do it in a way where they bend and often break the law… They used the shield of the Chinese Communist Party virus as part of their way to flood the zones with these absentee ballots.”

Stuffing the ballot box and breaking the law may be a time-honored tradition in some cities run by one party, but when it reaches a scale of millions, it can hardly be considered behavior that is permanently acceptable in a functioning republic.

Navarro’s report was, again, disparaged. The mainstream media did not even try to refute any of the arguments in it. Instead, they simply brushed them aside, just as they had done with massively substantiated reports in the New York Post about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which implicated the entire Biden family in selling access and influence abroad, especially in China.

Most of the mainstream media have remained faithful to the guidelines they adopted on November 4. They repeat that the election had no fraud, they pour scorn on anyone who dares to talk about fraud, and they keep emphasizing that Joe Biden won overwhelmingly. It seems as they are hoping that by repetition they can present the citizenry with a done deal and stifle any kind of dissent. They hide facts. Very few articles have pointed out that the US economy, before the onset of the Chinese coronavirus, had not done as brilliantly in 50 years or that President Trump, also before the pandemic, had received major concessions from China, among other major accomplishments. Instead, for more than three years, they parroted unfounded assertions about a supposed collusion with Russia that many, from the start, knew was false. Accusations that disregard the presumption of innocence is expected of propagandists, but not of a free press. Unfortunately, however, propaganda, often false, was and still is the behavior many have adopted towards President Trump, even before he became president.

Gradually, the states in which the election results were disputed nevertheless certified the results and appointed electors, thereby giving way to reports of possible bribes and threats. On December 14, when the electors voted, Biden obtained 306 electoral votes out of 270 required. The mainstream media rejoiced. As Trump refused to concede, as is perfectly within his constitutional rights, they tried to claim that he did not “respect democracy.”

It might be worthwhile in this context to ask if President Trump was wrong and if the November 3 election in the disputed states actually was lawful.

The evidence gathered is available to be seen. That judges dismissed lawsuits without seeing it does not make it disappear. Rather, it probably leads to questions about the open-mindedness and moral fortitude of the judges and others who have refused to see it.

The arguments presented by Paxton have not been refuted. The Supreme Court did not even take them into account. Several legal scholars have said that Paxton’s arguments were perfectly valid. The renowned defense attorney Alan M. Dershowitz stated about the attitude of the Supreme Court towards the Texas State complaint: “I think this sends a message. It’s not a legal message, but it’s a practical message: the Supreme Court is out of this game.” The Constitution clearly appears to have been violated by Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. If Paxton’s arguments are valid, the Supreme Court, by declaring itself “out of this game”, appears to have failed in its role as guardian of the Constitution. Attorney Clarice Feldman stated that said the Court had engaged in an “outright abdication”

On the evening of Trump’s election, November 8, 2016, commentators on CNN and MSNBC had already begun saying that Trump’s election might not be legitimate. Mere minutes after he was sworn in as president on January 20, 2017, The Washington Post announced: “The campaign to impeach President Trump has begun”.

Thousands of defamatory articles and comments followed and have not stopped. A study released in October showed that news about President Trump on evening newscasts has been negative 92% of the time. A survey conducted in seven swing states and published on November 26 revealed that negative news for Biden and positive news for Trump had not only been hidden, but that this subterfuge had influenced the vote on November 3. Seventeen percent of those who voted for Biden said they would not have done so had they been aware of the family’s compromising financial transactions; allegations of sexual assault brought against President-Elect Biden; or Kamala Harris being labeled as “most liberal senator in 2019”.

It now looks as if Biden will be declared President on January 6 and inaugurated on January 20, but imagining that a page will be turned and that what happened before, during and after the November 3 election will leave no mark is most probably an illusion.

President Trump still has not conceded, as is his right. “As President”, he explained on December 2, “I have no higher duty than to defend the laws and the Constitution of the United States. That is why I am determined to protect our election system, which is now under coordinated assault and siege”. These do not seem the words of a man who gives up. On December 22, he released a video in which he repeats what he has said many times: “The truth is we won the election by a landslide. We won it big”. On December 26, he added, “If we have corrupt elections, we have no country”. Even if Donald Trump were to leave the White House, the 74 million people who voted for him probably hope that he will not remain silent.

A poll conducted on November 17-18 shows that nearly half of likely voters (75% of Republicans, 30% of Democrats) think the election was stolen from Trump. No poll on the subject has been conducted since, but information on election fraud is more available today than a month ago, and it is reasonable to think that the number of voters who think that the election was stolen has also grown, not shrunk.

A president who arrives at the White House surrounded by so many questions of impropriety has an extremely dark shadow of illegitimacy hanging over him.

The behavior of the U.S. Department of Justice — which has refused to hold accountable visible instances of felonies (here, here, here and here); the many Americans who refuse to consider evidence, to question if today there really is equal justice under law in the United States; the behavior of the Supreme Court refusing to hear evidence concerning alleged violations of the Constitution — all of these should rightly lead many Americans to doubt the functioning of the country’s most crucial institutions.

There are accusations that many politicians in America are not even slightly interested in fair elections or equal justice under law — only about attaining power and keeping it in perpetuity.

“Make no mistake,” wrote former speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich: “Voter fraud is real. Democrats, the media and the so-called public interest groups on the political Left will tell you otherwise, but they are either lying or totally ignorant. Voter fraud is a threat to the integrity of our elections, the heart of our democracy—and [many people] want to make the problem worse with their new voting laws.”

There are reports that if the runoff election in Georgia on January 5 awards all of the branches of government to just one party, that party will immediately rush to revise the United States structurally — dismantling the safeguards of checks and balances in the Constitution that its framers so carefully placed there precisely to avoid the kind of totalitarian “tyranny of the majority” that much of the public seems eager to adopt. As one member of Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, revealingly said, “I’m going to spending my next couple of months doing everything I can… so that we don’t have to negotiate…”

Americans’ confidence in the media, already low, appears to have fallen even lower. A September 2020 poll disclosed that six out of ten US adults have “not very much” trust in the media, or “none at all”. With good reason.

Other disturbing elements have also come to light.

The contents of a computer left by Hunter Biden at a repair shop revealed ties between Hunter Biden, other members of his family and foreign powers, especially China, which indicate that Joe Biden may be seriously compromised. The Biden family appear to have received millions of dollars from Chinese firms, most of which, as is the compulsory system in China, have a Chinese version of close “public-private partnership” ties to the Chinese regime.

Former Attorney General William Barr said in November that he had instructed prosecutors to prevent any mention of investigations into Hunter Biden from becoming public to “not affect the result of the election”. However, as Trump campaign spokesman Hogan Gidley said:

“Covering this whole thing up and not allowing the American people to know it and to try and pretend as though the reason this doesn’t come forward is because it would affect the election — not bringing it forward affected the election”.

Despite the appearance of widespread election fraud that appear worth investigating, Barr said: “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” Has Barr looked?

According to former counterintelligence case officer Chris Farrell, “Barr was integral to the destruction of Trump… As a businessman, President Trump had the naïve non-Washington DC notion that his employees would actually work for him”. If members of the President’s cabinet are not working for him and instead try to destroy him, it probably means that American republic is in danger and that the will of the American people no longer counts.

That a man belonging to a family suspected of corruption, who could well be subject to blackmail by the main political and economic adversary of the United States, China, might become president of the United States, should worry every American.

The year 2020 has been disastrous. It has brought suffering and devastation to millions of Americans. The outbreak of the Chinese coronavirus has already caused more than 350,000 deaths in the US. The resulting lockdowns triggered a recession, a sharp increase in unemployment and and a far-reaching poverty that has not been fully absorbed. “Big box” stores, crowded with customers, were allowed to remain open; while smaller, neighborhood businesses, especially restaurants and personal services, were closed and crushed. The June-July riots devastated many cities, killed at least 25 people and injured 700 police officers, sometimes seriously. Mayors in several of the ravaged cities have reacted by defunding their police forces, protecting criminals rather than potential victims, and easing accountability for criminals. This inversion of justice has created an Alice-in-Wonderland situation that appears to have led to still more insecurity and crime.

The arrival at the head of the country of a man, President-Elect Biden, who appears both illegitimate and compromised before he even begins, only adds a more dangerous dimension to an already dangerous geopolitical setting.

Many commentators apparently accept the idea that Biden will soon be president and resign themselves to it. Others apparently have decided that accepting so much corruption and perceived corruption is unacceptable. It could, they assess, undermine American democracy, fatally erode American institutions, and plummet the country into an authoritarian future, foreign or domestic, and economic ruin.

“Weak-kneed [politicians],” columnist Charlie Eastman wrote, “who choose to wave the white flag instead of fighting to the last man to challenge the fraud that occurred in the 2020 election are committing political suicide”.

The author Conrad Black noted:

“It is one of the great ironies of modern times that the world owes chiefly to the United States the spread and comparative success of democracy and of the free market, and yet the United States is not now one of the world’s better-functioning democracies. All through this election year we heard spokespeople for both parties repeating the tired pieties about the ‘greatest country in human history.’ By some measures it certainly is, but it now appears not really to be a functioning democracy. If the United States cannot, in Lincoln’s words, ‘bind up the nation’s wounds,’ and re-emerge as a strong democracy, the end of Western Civilization is in sight. It remains the indispensable country, and as Richard Nixon said in 1970: ‘No power on earth can. . . defeat or humiliate the United States, except the United States.'”

“I think we are headed toward a serious, bitter struggle in America,” noted former Speaker of the House Gingrich. “This extraordinary, coordinated… power grab threatens the fabric of our country and the freedom of every American.”

Dr. Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, is the author of 27 books on France and Europe.