@nirgal: you realize how vague "find votes" is tho right?
Can be taken as "find votes that weren't counted"
Could be taken a bunch of different ways. That's not evidence. That's nothing.
If he believed there was fraud what is surprising about him saying there was fraud????
I stepped away for a week or so, and I'm surprised we're back at this point.
Anyway, I'd say it doesn't really matter whether or not Trump genuinely believed his claims, because it should be easy to convince a jury that he had no reason to believe them.
Trump had zero evidence of election fraud. His advisors consistently told him there was no fraud, and no evidence of fraud. The intelligence community told him there was no fraud. Their investigations found no fraud. His court cases found no fraud. It will be obvious that he ought to have known there was no fraud, and so he either knew he was lying or he was indifferent to the truth. It's overwhelmingly clear that a reasonable person in his position, with access to the vast amount of intelligence he had, would have known those statements were false.
If you put him on the stand, he'd look like a liar. "You made claim X on this date. What evidence did you have of claim X?" "When senior advisor Y told you that this evidence was incorrect, why didn't you believe them?" "When the local Republican official said claim X was incorrect, why did you continue to make claim X?" "When the DOJ's investigation into claim X concluded that there was zero election fraud, why did you continue to make claim X?" "When your court case presented no evidence to support claim X and was dismissed, why did you continue to claim X was true?" and so on, and so on.
He has no answers to any of that, and him saying "I honestly believed it" will look completely unreasonable given the weight of evidence against him. Trump is flaky giving testimony at the best of times; he'd absolutely wilt and incriminate himself against one of the world's best prosecutors.
It's also not super important in the long run. He set up a series of fake electors, and tried to use his statements of election fraud to convince key people to accept the votes from his fake electors. Even if he somehow convinces people that he genuinely believed his statements, he still goes to prison for trying to challenge the election through illegal means.
*edit* Hell, I'd say that even if he was totally right and the election fraud was real, the methods he used to overturn the election would still put him in prison.
all very well stated.
Thank you for saving the rest of us the trouble. The only question is how much time he will do and how many of his sheeples will follow him completely off the sanity cliff defending the honor of an almost-billionaire who never gave 2 pennies about them or their actual issues beyond making them feel better with his empty rhetoric and wouldn't speak to any of them on the street if he could avoid it.
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