Into the Trump Slime Zone with Legal Analyst Joe Hayden
Noted New Jersey defense lawyer Joseph Hayden wrote the following in a recent Insidernj.com column:
“What Donald Trump has done since Election Day, in shamelessly trying to interfere with the vote counting process and the judgment and decision-making of election officials in the swing states, filing over 50 frivolous lawsuits, challenging the integrity of the election process and embarking upon an unprecedented publicity campaign to sow the seeds of disinformation about who won the election and the validity of the election process, simply cannot be ignored. However important it is for our country to heal, it is equally important that the rule of law and the viability of the democratic process not be abandoned.”
And that was a few weeks before the president’s phone call over the weekend to Georgia election officials in which Trump implored the state’s Secretary of State to “find” votes for him – more than 11,000 of them.
In the wake of that news, Hayden was asked today what might happen if, hypothetically, a president made a similar call – and request – to New Jersey election officials.
“President Trump is knocking on the door of soliciting some form of election fraud by that conversation,” Hayden said.
So, if it occurred in New Jersey, law enforcement officials would move to prosecute him, right?
Maybe not.
Hayden said some prosecutors might pause upon realizing the phone conversation was about an hour long.
He said their possible concern would be the “amorphous nature of this meandering conversation.”
Yet on the other hand, Trump’s phone call to Georgia doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It follows two months of dozens of lawsuits – just about all of which have been dismissed – and reported personal lobbying by the president of state election officials and legislators – all with the aim of changing election results.
Hayden said that can be interpreted as a “pattern” of Trump trying to influence the election after the fact.
In all, Hayden said that the call reinforces the fact that the president is getting more desperate by the day.
The issue is not what CNN, The New York Times, or Mr. Hayden think, it is as the Constitution notes what the Legislatures of the different states, and the Representatives of those states in the Congress think, is what the Constitution puts forward as the possible roadmap by which the ambiguities before them can be resolved. The Constitution gives the state legislatures the ability to set the rules, the question is have those rules been followed, or have the rules they put in place in fact caused the question of illegitimacy or the possibility of illegitimacy to be injected into the process. At the very least, the whole question of how Vote By Mail and other measures, combined with the inability to insure the legitimacy of those and other voting measures is the way to go. Looking back, i think that the rush to judgement method of pushing through virtually only Vote By Mail here in New Jersey and elsewhere, as well as the failure to purge the voting rolls of all who in fact are not eligible voters as required by the National Voter Registration Act. Nationally at least 2.5 million people were not eligible to vote, and in Nevada alone thousands who moved out of state voted, and possibly voted in multiple states. As Congressman Van Drew from New Jersey noted, he wants to insure, as have many others both Republican and Democrat have said, we must be able to assure the public, all the public, that the election outcome is just and legitimate.