OPINION:
To understand history is to understand just how outrageous the latest indictment of Donald Trump is. President Biden’s uber-partisan and ultra-weaponized Department of Justice asserts that Mr. Trump committed fraud for using the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to object to a stolen 2020 election. In fact, the act was created exactly for such a purpose.
In the 1876 presidential election, Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote against Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. However, Tilden was one shy of the 185 electoral votes needed to beat Hayes, even as evidence surfaced of fraud and intimidation of Republican voters in several battleground states. Sound familiar?
Because the Constitution didn’t provide clear guidelines on resolving the dispute, Congress set up a bipartisan Electoral Commission. Voting along party lines, the commission handed the election to Hayes after ruling that 20 electoral votes in four contested states would go to him.
To ensure that such a bitter dispute wouldn’t be repeated, Congress passed the 1887 Act. It gave states the power to certify their electoral votes; and, most relevant to Mr. Trump’s phony indictment, set up a procedure allowing objections.
If at least one House member and one senator objected to a state’s vote, the House and Senate would separately debate the objection for up to two hours and then vote on it. If no candidate received a majority of electoral votes, the election would be decided by the House of Representatives, with each state delegation having one vote.
Here is why understanding this history is so important. Since the passage of the Electoral Count Act of 1887, both Democrats and Republicans have frequently used the act to legally object to election results.
In fact, since the 1968 election, the act has been used to dispute results in more than one-third of the 14 elections that have been held. And here’s the buried and beautifully ironic lead: It has been the Democrats, not Republicans, who have more frequently used the 1887 Act.
The partisan poster child here is the 2016 Clinton v. Trump election. Democratic Reps. Jamie Raskin, James Clyburn, and five others invoked the 1887 Act to try to derail Mr. Trump’s lawful election.
Messrs. Raskin and Clyburn would go on to push two phony impeachments of Mr. Trump, and they would later serve on the partisan witch hunt otherwise known as the J6 Committee, now being used as a cudgel in the Trump indictment process.
To my knowledge, neither of these partisans has ever been indicted for election interference for their use of the 1887 Act. Nor have Messrs. Raskin and Clyburn — along with other election interferers like Rep. Adam Schiff — ever been indicted for their abuse of the indictment process or their scurrilous roles in the Russia hoax.
Americans now fully understand this: The sole purpose of indicting Mr. Trump is to prevent him from becoming president again. And here’s the real history lesson “tell” in the Biden Department of Justice’s election interference con game.
On Dec. 23, 2022, in a lame-duck session, congressional Democrats, in coalition with nine RINO House members, voted to amend the 1887 Act. Moreover, these cowards did not do so in a stand-alone bill, but rather by burying the amendment in a massive pork-barrel spending package.
The most important revision was to designate the vice president’s role in the Electoral College count as “ceremonial.” This change was a quite startling tacit admission that on Jan. 6, 2021, then-Vice President Mike Pence, as president of the Senate, indeed had the discretion to do what many members of Congress, along with Mr. Trump, wanted Mr. Pence to do that fateful day:
Send the issue back to the states to investigate well-documented instances of fraud based on the objections raised before Mr. Pence by a number of GOP lawmakers spearheaded by Rep. Andy Biggs and Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley.
Of course, Mr. Pence refused to exercise that discretion on Jan. 6. Astonishingly, as the public record indicates, Mr. Pence’s refusal was based on a legal opinion of his own counsel rather than one issued (or vetted) by Mr. Trump’s White House legal counsel.
Here, Mr. Trump was within his legal rights to expect his own vice president to follow White House procedures in reviewing legal matters. Instead, Mr. Pence went rogue, thereby foreclosing any opportunity to investigate fraud and get a legal count of the votes quite legally under the 1887 Act.
The final pillar of sand the Trump indictment is built on is the dubious claim that Mr. Trump knew the election was fair but still cried foul. Here, we don’t need a legal scholar like Jonathan Turley to tell us that if some folks around Mr. Trump told him the election was fair and others told him it was rigged, that doesn’t prove Mr. Trump believed it was rigged. It just proves, as is his public reputation, that Mr. Trump comes to his own conclusions by listening to a broad array of voices.
The bottom backfiring line: Mr. Trump gets another fake indictment, the Biden crime family goes uninvestigated, the American people lose more faith in our judicial system, and Mr. Trump rises further in the polls.
• Peter Navarro served as former President Donald Trump’s manufacturing czar and chief China strategist. All material in this column comes from the public record. This column originally appeared at http://peternavarro.substack.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.