Trump threatens to prosecute Clinton if she pursues recount? Now there’s a good reason for her to do it.
I was sitting at my desk this evening, wondering why Green Party candidate Jill Stein was pursuing a recount of votes cast in Wisconsin… and why she might do the same in Michigan and Pennsylvania. For the life of me I could not understand what was motivating Stein.
While searching online for something that might explain Stein’s request for a recount, I came across a slew of articles reporting that Hillary Clinton would be joining Stein in her request. Now, I was really confused.
Why would Hillary Clinton want a recount of votes in Wisconsin, or anywhere else for that matter? It’s not like it would change the election’s outcome, and she had to also know that. And, at least to my way of thinking, requesting the recount wasn’t making her look good… so why bother? It just didn’t make any sense.
I finally found the explanation… at least pieces of one.
For one thing, Hillary was said to be reluctantly joining Stein, so that’s better than being enthusiastically doing so. For another, she said that she was being pressured by supporters, among others, to join Stein’s request for a recount in order to ensure that all votes were counted properly so that everyone would know with absolute certainty that Donald Trump had won the election as originally reported.
Okay, so… okay. I figured that was about the best one could do there, but I also thought to myself… if that’s the only reason to join Stein, I’d back away from the whole recount idea, were I in Hillary’s flats, of course.
I kept thinking about how, during the debates, Trump had implied that he might not accept the election results as being valid were he to lose… and how Hillary had so harshly criticized him as a result. Now, with Hillary joining the recount with Stein, Trump would accuse her of not accepting the results of the election, thus throwing what she had said to him, right back into her face.
No, this seemed like a bad idea from the moment I first heard about it, and after reading up on the details… it still seemed a really bad idea for Hillary.
Her supporters should understand all of this, I thought. It would be obvious why she would not want to go forward with the recount, surely. Especially because, as Hillary had readily admitted, it wasn’t about overturning the results of the election as she did not expect the recount to change the outcome. Everyone would understand that, I concluded… so, fine. Call Stein and tell her she’s on her own for the recount.
Once that’s done, can we please get on with either destroying our world as we know it… or making all the rich people richer… whatever President Trump and the GOP have in mind? This whole campaign was way too heavy on the personal attacks and essentially void of any policy discussions. It’s time to do some actual stuff… you know, things that will make America great again… or not.
No one really knows exactly what this president is capable of, or thinking, so no one knows exactly what to expect. Let’s let the man get settled, he’s already hired a few “evil cohorts,” if you’re on the left… or “solid choices for his cabinet,” for those on the right… but he still has to hire several thousand more people for jobs that I’m pretty sure he’s never even heard of until now.
So, let’s let him get off Twitter and back to work by not screwing around with the whole recount drama, wouldn’t that make more sense for everyone involved? I was getting ready to send an email to the Secretary of State expressing my views… and then it happened… something showed up in my newsfeed… and everything changed for me.
The headline read:
Trump Threatens to Prosecute Hillary Clinton If She Pursues An Election Recount.
Oh no he didn’t.
Oh yes, he did.
Excerpted from CNN’s State of the Union, Kellyanne Conway said it this way…
(Cue the music: The Theme from The Godfather.)
“I think he’s being quite magnanimous and at the same time he’s not undercutting at all the authority and the autonomy of the Department of Justice, of the FBI, of the House Committees, who knows where the evidence may lead if, in fact, it were “” if the investigation were re-opened somewhere.”
Yes, who knows where the evidence may lead, indeed. Wow, that was very Don Vito Corleone of her, wasn’t it? Next, is she going to make an offer Hillary can’t refuse?
“I would say he has been incredibly gracious and magnanimous to Secretary Clinton at a time when for whatever reason her folks are saying they will join in a recount to try to somehow undo the 70 plus electoral votes that he beat her by. I mean this “” you know, I was asked on CNN and elsewhere, goodness a thousand times, will Donald Trump accept the election results? And now you’ve got the Democrats and Jill Stein saying they do not accept the election results. She congratulated him and conceded to him on election night. I was right there. And the idea that we are going to drag this out now where the president-elect has been incredibly magnanimous to the Clintons and to the Obamas is incredible.”
Yes, it is incredible… I agree, really quite incredible. It sure doesn’t sound like something a person of respect would do to his or her Don, now does it? Nope, that’s no way to show respect to the Don.
The chilling interpretation by Jason Easley writing for Politicususa.com was as follows…
“Conway was issuing a not so thinly veiled threat to Hillary Clinton. If Clinton’s team continues to assist with the recount, the former Secretary of State may face prosecution. The incoming administration is expressing their willingness to punish anyone who questions or expresses dissent.”
You know, Donald Trump and even his fledgling administration does have a habit of attacking or threatening people in response to something they’ve said about him that he found objectionable. I hate that for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which would be the good old First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution… the one that grants freedom of speech. As amendments go, the first is a biggie with me… huge, actually.
Reading Conway’s not very veiled threat directed directly at Hillary, well… it made me rethink my position on what Hillary should or should not do in response to President-elect Trump’s bullying. The short answer is don’t let him intimidate you… he’s certainly not going to intimidate me under any circumstances, I can promise you that.
Concerning the recount request in Wisconsin, it’s Hillary’s right to request it, so if that’s what you think you should do… well, then… you go girl. (Was that misogynistic sounding? Am I going to get in trouble for that?)
The point is… don’t let the president scare you. I’m talking to Hillary… and to every other citizen of this country. His bark is sure to be much worse than his bite on this one. In fact, on this one… I’m confident that he’s all bark.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump, was now clearly becoming obsessed with the idea of Hillary and Jill Stein recounting votes in Wisconsin, and as we’ve seen, when he gets obsessed, he really gets obsessed. Add Twitter to the equation and hold onto your hat, because it’s very likely to be a bumpy ride.
Well, this time the President-elect decided that he’d play off something he’d heard that seemed to support the case for voter fraud to have occurred during the election. Earlier the same day, Lou Dobbs on Fox News had reported the same statistics, and they sounded alarming, on the surface, at least.
“People that have died 10 years ago are still voting,” Trump said today, and not for the first time. Lou Dobbs had reported the same thing earlier, I watched him.
Trump continued…
“So many cities are corrupt and voter fraud is very, very common. The following information comes straight from Pew Research: Approximately 24 million people, one of every eight voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or significantly inaccurate. One in eight! More than 1.8 million deceased individuals right now are listed as voters. Oh, that’s wonderful. Well, if they’re gonna vote for me, we’ll think about it. But I have a feeling they’re not gonna vote for me. Of the 1.8 million, 1.8 million is voting for someone else.”
But, it’s never quite enough for Mr. Trump… once he gets tweeting, it seems there’s simply no stopping him. Here’s Trump tweeting on Sunday…
“In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
He also commented that there’s no reason for Hillary to recount votes, because he won by millions as a result of the entirely unsubstantiated but already accepted by millions as incontrovertible fact, widespread voter fraud.
Trump’s proof of this voter fraud? Can’t you guess?
Right… he pointed directly at the same Pew Research Study that, among other things, found that there were 1.8 million deceased people still registered to vote.
The same Pew Study, which was conducted in support of upgrading our voter registration system in 2012, also found that, “12.7 million records that year appeared to be out of date. Some 12 million had bad address information.” (By the way, if you add the two together, you get to the 24 million number that Trump has been using as evidence of voter fraud.)
So, let’s just subtotal things here…
1. According to Pew, we’ve got 1.8 million dead people still registered to vote…
2. We’ve got 12.7 millions out of date records and 12 million with incorrect addresses.
3. Add it all up… and you’ve got MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD, by Donald Trump.
Okay, hang on… now I think Hillary has no choice… she MUST proceed with the recount in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. No question about it… with this kind of voter fraud going on, how can she not press for the recount?
Trump is not implying, rather he’s stating quite clearly that potentially tens of millions of votes were either cast by dead people or, according to the President-elect, by illegal immigrants that shouldn’t be voting at all.
How can we not join Hillary in the recount? Who knows what we’ll learn from doing it? If she received votes that were cast by dead people or illegal immigrants, then she may have actually lost the popular vote in addition to the Electoral College, right? Or, I suppose it’s also possible that the illegal or ghostly votes were cast in his favor, in which case he may have lost by even more than reported to-date.
Or, maybe there aren’t any illegal immigrants or dead people voting at all, and Donald Trump, Lou Dobbs, and Lord only knows who else, all simply misunderstood what the Pew Research Study reported. Could that be it? Could it be that simple?
Yes. I’m afraid so.
Pew did find 1.8 million voter registrations for deceased Americans. That part is true.
But, it’s a situation totally unrelated to anything we’re talking about here. You see, people die all the time… like every day all over the country. And in many instances, they forget to contact the voter registration people to let them know they’re dead. Even family members often forget to have their loved one’s removed… and so, violÃ¥… 1.8 million folks, dead, but registered.
In a similar vein, you’ll find quite a few dead people still listed in the phone book… or with Directory Assistance, I suppose would be more up-to-date. And lots of dead people are still being billed for cable too, I’d imagine.
That doesn’t mean the dead folks voted, you realize. Only that they’re still registered to vote because no one has yet removed them. That’s all, nothing more.
Dead people very rarely show up at the polls to cast their ballots, and they’re not fans of absentee ballots either. (I think the reason for that might be that the postage is wicked high from where dead people have to mail things.)
How do 12.7 million records get to be out-of-date or have bad addresses? It’s another easy one, if you just think about it. People move, they get married, they join the Army, head off to college, get transferred by their employers… all sorts of things happen. Sometimes these traveling voters remember to update their registration to vote, but in many instances they don’t.
See, no big deal… right? None of this is evidence of voter fraud, it’s just what happens when a database bumps up against the inadequacies of human beings. The states have processes for deleting old records, although it’s not something that can be done quickly… you wouldn’t want to inadvertently delete someone’s registration only to find out later that the individual isn’t dead, for example.
According to the Washington Post…
“The critical question here is the one Trump skips over in service to his rhetoric: Are those 24 million bad registrations, or those 1.8 million registrations for dead people, being used in a systematic way to conduct voter fraud? And the answer, very simply, is no.”
That being said, no one would argue with someone finding instances where a ballot was somehow cast for a dead person… out of 120 million votes, there’s bound to be some number of problems somewhere along the chain. There could also be instances where the same person has voted in two states, but no one thinks it’s the sort of thing that happens anywhere near frequently.
And who knows? Maybe there are millions of illegal immigrants voting for president in this country… I’ve long since given up on the idea of ruling things out… I’ve learned the hard way that anything truly is, at the very least… possible. And maybe we’ll catch something as a result of Hillary and Jill Stein’s recount in Wisconsin… I really have no idea.
What Donald Trump, is now saying about this, is that there’s a conspiracy to throw votes over to Hillary by casting ballots on behalf of dead people… and that’s simply not true… at least not having anything to do with the 1.8 million deceased voters discovered by the Pew Research Study.
If it is happening, then it’s happening some other way, because those 1.8 million dead people aren’t casting ballots, they’re just waiting to be deleted from the rolls.
How would it even work? How would you use dead people to pad the voting for Hillary Clinton? How would anyone know in advance in which states those dead people votes will matter most? I guess you’d need teams of thousands standing by throughout maybe 30 states… and they’d have to be stealthy… very stealthy. And loyal… very loyal. Ridiculous… right?
Watching this story of dead people voting travel all over the Internet, through all the major newspapers, and then onto cable and broadcast news like a flood of fertilizer, has truly been something to behold.
I’m kind of used to Trump saying stuff like this without making sure he’s got the right stat for the job, but watching Lou Dobbs and his erudite and accomplished guest… whose name I cannot recall at the moment… sit there for 30 minutes discussing the mutual feelings of horror they experienced upon learning that 1.8 million registered voters were in truth… dead.
All I could wonder as I watched Dobbs’ show discuss a non-issue was… does he know better or does he actually believe the 1.8 million registered dead people have actually been voting? And I’m not at all sure I want to know the answer to that question… it might terrify me.
Bottom-line… Hillary, start recounting in Wisconsin and let’s see what we can find out about the election’s real results… and also let’s see what can be learned about voter fraud… how much of it is real and how much is just a stat that on the surface looked like it fit the narrative perfectly, but ended up making Lou Dobbs look like he’s working with a hole in his head through which all of his common sense has escaped.
A message for President-elect Trump or someone on the Trump team.
Stop threatening journalists and others who write about your presidency and the country in general. It only gets them excited about the task at hand. And you’re the president, sir. You are probably the least protected person in the entire country when it comes to being talked or written about in a derogatory way.
You’re screwed on this point sir… might as well just toughen up. Otherwise, I fear that this is going to be a very long four years for you, sir.
Likewise, threatening your opponent with prosecution if she proceeds with the recount in Wisconsin is not only wildly inappropriate, it also comes off as flat out bullying… and might even be seen as an abuse of power or something. I’m not sure.
Sir… you really don’t need to respond to every little thing. Let Hillary recount Wisconsin until the cows come home. We may learn something about the voter fraud you’re describing. We may find out the count was already correct and there was nothing wrong. But, just let it go and it’ll be over before you can say… tweet tweet.
Mandelman out.