The Marine JAG veteran and former senior Homeland Security officer working on President Donald J. Trump’s legal team tells RedState that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump revealed Aug. 1 is a surprisingly weak case against the former president.
“I don’t think anybody thinks Donald Trump believes he lost the election,” says Christina Bobb, the author of “Stealing Your Vote: The Inside Story of the 2020 Election and What It Means for 2024.”
Smith’s central legal thesis is that Trump knew that he lost the 2020 election and that his subsequent actions and statements were corrupt and criminal.
Bobb says Smith’s premise is absurd:
If Donald Trump believes and believed at that time that the election was stolen and that there was a plot to steal and rig the election as the president of the United States–he had a constitutional obligation to do exactly what he did, which is communicate with the states and make sure that the states are doing their part to protect their own.
“The only way that President Trump’s actions could potentially be perceived as some type of conspiracy would be if he believed that he lost and was trying to steal authority anyway,” Bobb said.
Trump was the constitutional victim of J6
Critical to the left’s J6 narrative is that the angry mob that showed up at the Capitol was working in Trump’s interests. Yet, the protesters began crashing the barriers on the Capitol grounds just as Trump’s congressional allies challenged former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s electors from Arizona.
Trump ally Rep. Paul Gosar (R.-Ariz.) objected to Arizona’s Biden slate, and it was seconded by Sen. Ted Cruz (R.-Texas), which triggered an adjournment of the joint session of Congress called to adjudicate the presidential elector slates sent to Congress by the state legislatures.
If one congressman and one senator challenge a state’s electors, the two chambers meet separately for a maximum of two hours of debate, followed by a vote. If both chambers vote to reject a state’s electors, they are taken off the board. They are not awarded to another candidate.
If Trump allies successfully challenged Arizona’s 11 electors, plus Georgia’s 16 and Wisconsin’s 10, Biden’s total would drop from 306 to 269—although any greater combination that took any candidate below 270 would do.
When no candidate reaches 270 electoral votes, the presidential election goes to the House of Representatives. In the House, each state’s delegation votes, and because Republicans had majorities in more House delegations than the Democrats, Trump would have been expected to win his second term.
While the House and Senate debated Arizona, the protesters crashed the gates, leading to both chambers going into a recess. When Congress reconvened, the Trump allies lost support, and objections to the Biden electors became politically untenable.
In effect, the crashing of the Capitol gates disrupted the plan developed by Trump’s congressional allies—it was not in any way part of a plan for Trump to subvert the Constitution or seize power.
The J6 protesters blocked Trump’s challenges, ensuring he would have to relinquish power on January 20, 2021.
Bobb says Trump behaved as a man seeking vindication from the official process; Biden governs as a man who believes he stole the election, seeking to advance as much of the leftwing agenda as quickly as possible.
“I don’t think if Joe Biden had legitimately won the election, I don’t think he would immediately come into office and start taking the action that he was taking, opening the border, giving a $100 billion to Ukraine, doing his best to start a Third World War,” she says.
Bobb, the former executive secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, says the list of Biden’s policy priorities is damning.
Tank the economy, increase inflation, get rid of jobs, normalize pedophilia, target parents at school boards. These are not things that legitimate winners do, so in some respects, I think the best evidence of a broken and stolen election is Joe Biden himself.
Trump has a constitutional right to exculpatory documents, records
Bobb says now that the Justice Department has brought charges, the Trump team has the opportunity to subpoena documents and videos that have been withheld from the public.
Donald Trump has a constitutional right to defend himself. He’s got a right to seek evidence and get evidence from the government—and we all believe that, we being Trump supporters, all believed that the federal government, the FBI, the Capitol Police, Nancy Pelosi’s office was involved in orchestrating a lot of the violence.
Bobb says Smith was clever in wording his indictment to allude to the J6 violence but not to accuse Trump of planning or directing it.
“It’s on page 39,” she says. “‘The defendant’s exploitation of the Violence and Chaos at the Capitol,’ so he doesn’t accuse President Trump of starting it, but he is like: ‘Oh, this violence broke out—and he used it.’”
Bobb says 20 months after J6; there are still questions.
“OK, who started it? Did you start it, FBI? Did you start it, Department of Justice? Did you start it, Capitol Police? Because somebody moved to the barricades,” she said. “We gotta get all of that information.”
She says another line of effort for the Trump legal team is the acquisition of the hundreds of interviews conducted by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.
After the committee issued its report, House Democrats sent their entire inventory of evidence and interviews to the National Archives, which were sealed from public view.
Bobb says the transfer to the archives was done so that any access to those records must be done through a judge, which is what Smith’s indictment allows them.
“The archives can’t do anything. Only the court can say: ‘You’re not entitled to that,’ –but we would subpoena those records.”