Jonathan P. Baird

Many aspects of former President Trump’s January 6 coup attempt have become clearer because of the work of the January 6 Committee. We know there was nothing spontaneous about the coup effort. As with Trump’s other attacks on democracy like his fake elector scheme, this was a highly planned operation.

From right after the time that Trump tweeted on December 19 for his shock troops to come to Washington D.C. for something “wild” until January 6, a plan evolved. Much money, strategizing and organizing were behind the insurrection.

However, there are many unanswered questions that deserve further exploration. The January 6 Committee hasn’t explained everything and I have more questions.

How much coordination existed between Trump operatives and the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers? What went on at the Willard Hotel war room command center leading to January 6? Key members of Trump world like Rudy Giuliani, Roger Stone, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon and John Eastman were part of the war room planning. From Cassidy Hutchinson we know that Mark Meadows called in to the war room on the evening of January 5.

Was there a developed plan in place for the violent attack on the Capitol that included Trump and his operatives? Was the violence planned by the Trump team?

Were the Proud Boys put in place early by Trump operatives to initiate the violent attack? We know from Nick Quested, a documentary filmmaker, that hundreds of Proud Boys cased the Capitol around 10:30am on January 6, long before Trump’s speech. I guess I don’t believe in “accidents”. We know that leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers met in a Washington DC parking garage on January 5. Why did Enrique Tarrio, Proud Boys chairman, post on Parler on December 29:

“We will not be wearing our traditional Black and Yellow. We will be incognito and we will be spread across downtown DC in smaller teams.”

Why were so many of the insurrectionists armed with lethal weapons like pistols and assault weapons? Why did they have flex ties and bear spray? Why did they stash an arsenal of firearms and ammunition at the Comfort Inn in Ballston, Va, a 15 minute drive from the Capitol? Why did Trump urge the removal of magnetometers on January 6 when he knew his supporters were armed?

Why were the Oath Keepers decked out in full tactical gear, wearing hard-knuckled gloves, tactical vests, camo helmets, ballistic goggles and radios with earpieces? Why did they march in stack formation? Were they expecting some order from Trump to justify military action?

Who planted the pipe bombs that did not explode? How did the bombs fit into the plot?

Did any of the far right groups plan to execute leaders they considered enemies like Nancy Pelosi or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Did they actually plan to hang Mike Pence? Would that have happened if Pence was captured? Were there murder cells? When Trump tweeted at 2:24pm that he was disappointed in Pence for lacking courage was that seen by Trump supporters as an implicit order to carry out Pence’s execution?

How close were we to martial law being declared by Trump? We know that Mike Flynn advocated that. Even as late as January 17, 2021, a few days before Biden’s inauguration, Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene was texting Mark Meadows, presidential chief of staff, that members of Congress wanted Trump to declare martial law so Trump could stay in power.

Was the Willard Hotel war room plan that Trump was going to march on the Capitol with his supporters and declare himself President/dictator? Why didn’t Trump end up marching to the Capitol as he said he was going to do?

What was the Secret Service actually up to on January 6? Were some Secret Service agents in cahoots with Trump’s coup? Why was Mike Pence unwilling to get in the vice presidential limo with the Secret Service and leave the capitol? Were agents going to fly him to Alaska or remove him so that Trump’s scheme could move ahead?

Did Trump really grab the steering wheel of his limo and forcefully argue to get the Secret Service to allow him to march on the Capitol? Did the Secret Service say “no” simply because they could not guarantee his safety in the crowd?

Why did the Secret Service delete text messages around January 5 and 6? As federal government employees they know the importance of maintaining and safeguarding records. It is legally required. How could they disappear evidence on days they knew in advance would be historically important even with a system migration?

The Secret Service received a letter on January 16, 2021 from the chairs of four congressional committees instructing preservation of all January 6-related documents. The erasure took place after the oversight officials’ request. The January 6 Committee received only one text message from the Secret Service after issuing a subpoena on July 15. Did the Secret Service calculate the risk of exposure was worse than intentionally covering up?

Homeland Security Chief Chad Wolf and acting deputy secretary Ken Cuccinelli also deleted text messages around January 6. Coincidences like this stop looking like coincidences. Looking back on Watergate, the Rosemary Woods tape gap was 18 minutes. Here there is a more widespread pattern of cover-up. Remember Trump also disappeared records for hours on January 6. This adds greatly to the impression of a systemic cover-up. Was cover-up part of the war room plan?

We know that for hours Trump gleefully watched TV coverage of the assault on the Capitol and he didn’t order police or military intervention. Was the reason he did not order such intervention part of.a plan to stop election certification? The more chaos created, the more impossible it became for Congress to conduct any business. Delay prevented the feared goal: certification.

Why did the police or military not anticipate what was going to happen on January 6 when there was so much advance notice of the insurrectionists’ intentions? There were so few defenders at the Capitol to face the mob. On the night of January 5 on his podcast Steve Bannon said “to strap in”. He said “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow”. He called it “game day”. Why was that not taken seriously as the attack on the Capitol was entirely foreseeable?

How much did the Trump team have to do with disabling military or police response before and on January 6? Did the Trump team keep the National Guard away from the insurrection deliberately? Again, was delay part of the Trump plan to allow more time for his coup scheme to unfold?

Did the Trump operatives coordinate their violent insurrection plan with Congressional allies including people like Reps. Boebert, Greene, Jordan, Gaetz, Gosar and Sens. Hawley and Cruz? In the two month period prior to January 6, how many Congressional tours were actually reconnaissance missions so that future insurrectionists knew where to find legislators they targeted? Why was Boebert tweeting “1776”?

If they did nothing wrong, why, according to Cassidy Hutchinson, did Reps Biggs, Gohmert, Perry, Greene and Gaetz seek pardons from Trump? Doesn’t that show consciousness of criminality and guilt?

Hopefully, the January 6 Committee will look at questions like these and seek answers. Even without knowing all the answers, it is clear that MAGA fascism came close to succeeding on January 6. If Pence had gotten in the limo, if demonstrators had killed congressman or senators or if Trump had declared martial law, who knows? All supporters of democracy of whatever party should be very alarmed. The threat remains.

As a sixties survivor, I am conscious of being part of a shrinking community. So many comrades are already gone. Because the sixties are invoked so much, I also admit to being hyper-critical about depictions that attempt to convey that time. There are not many that pass muster but Craig McNamara’s book, Because Our Fathers Lied, is unique. The title comes from a Rudyard Kipling poem:

“If any question why we died
Tell them, because our fathers lied”

Craig McNamara is the son of Robert McNamara, former Secretary of Defense and the architect of the Vietnam war under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. His book exposes a lifelong struggle to come to terms with being the son of a war criminal but a war criminal he loved. It also honestly recounts a 60’s story in the best hippie radical tradition.

It is difficult to transmit now how much the Vietnam war was hated by my generation then. The pointlessness, the body counts, the abject racism toward the Vietnamese and the sheer imperialist waste of it all were not lost on us. Some of us became perpetually alienated skeptics or radicals. The journalist I.F. Stone used to say all governments lie and Vietnam taught us that truth. Vietnam was our education in empire.

What is unique about Craig McNamara’s story is how he manages to balance love of a father with angry reckoning about his father’s deeds. Craig never was able to confront his father, though. His father always evaded that confrontation.

His father was the exemplar of the Camelot mythology, the best and the brightest. Robert McNamara was the data-driven whiz kid who had been plucked from running Ford Motor Company to become JFK’s Secretary of Defense. The fact that he knew little about Vietnamese history or culture did not stop him from designing disastrous policies which killed massive numbers of human beings. This is what C. Wright Mills, author of The Power Elite, would have dubbed “crackpot realism”.

Craig ended up striking out away from any well beaten paths. After starting at Sidwell Friends, he transferred to St Paul’s School where he bombed out academically. He was dyslexic but that wasn’t recognized at the time. Still, he managed to get accepted at Stanford. But college was not for him. Like so many, he connected to the anti-war movement and activism. He experienced “a burning sadness” and deep trauma related to his father’s role. He suffered stomach ulcers. He wrote:

“This template of protest was the only thing available to make sense of the ugliness in my inner world.”

Craig describes what he calls the “chipper gene”. Typically his father would say things like “It’s a glorious day” no matter what kind of day it was. He never allowed Craig into any honest discussion of Vietnam although he vaguely acknowledged “mistakes”.

Needing a change and being determined 4-F for the draft, Craig dropped out of college and with two friends decided to ride motorcycles through Central and South America all the way to Chile. Craig spent two and a half years traveling. He and the others spoke no Spanish. They contended with motorcycle accidents, nightmarish bugs, potholes, impassable roads and unfriendly police. They had little understanding of the political landscape through which they were passing.

Arriving in Santiago, Chile in September 1971, Craig’s stay coincided with the new presidency of Salvador Allende. Allende’s election was an epic event in Latin America. He was a democratically elected Socialist, a precedent that tremendously worried then-President Nixon. Allende’s election released enormous enthusiasm and revolutionary fervor among the Chilean masses. This was Craig’s education in revolution.

Craig also was drawn to farming which really became his passion. He moved to an island where he lived in an underground cave and started a dairy cooperative. During this period, he was almost entirely cut off from his past life.

He left Chile around the time of the military coup that toppled Allende. His father had failed upward to presidency of the World Bank. The World Bank had cut off lending to Chile during the Allende years but resumed lending under the fascist Pinochet regime. Craig was horrified. After the coup in Chile, in his personal journal, Craig wrote:

“My soul is weeping and my heart is anguished. My passion for Chile and my companeros consumes me…Companero Allende, you will never be forgotten”

Upon his return to the U.S. Craig decided that farming would be his way forward. He wrote that he could not utter the word Vietnam without wanting to cry. He re-entered college at 25 to study agriculture at University of California Davis where he got a degree. His dream was to buy and run a farm.

Craig found a walnut farm in Winters, California which is in the northern part of the state. With financial help from his father, he purchased it in 1980. Craig describes worrying that others would think he rode on his father’s coattails although getting help from parents is hardly unusual.

For 42 years now, Craig has diligently worked the walnut farm. The work is very hard and not that lucrative but Craig has lived a life of integrity.

His story touches the universal theme of the difficulty of father and son relationships but it also raises questions about how to live a moral life in 2022. In watching the January 6 hearings, I have been struck by the overweening ambition and careerism of people who worked in the Trump White House, even people like Matthew Pottinger and Sarah Matthews who did the right thing and resigned.

The lure of professional success seems to have a powerful hold even when navigating a moral swamp. Whether it is love of power, prestige, desire for fame or money, professionals in the Trump orbit have seemed able to push moral considerations into the background. January 6 was hardly the start of venality and corruption in that administration

Craig McNamara’s example stands in total contrast to the get-ahead-at-any-cost mentality. Career advancement was never his yardstick.

I think the peace movement of the 1960’s played the role of necessary corrective to the sick vision of Robert McNamara and other war planners. A peace movement is something we are sorely lacking now. There are inadequate checks on the forces now pushing war and militarism. Craig McNamara stands in an honorable tradition of those who did not go along and who swam against the tide.

Anyone concerned about the future of the Democratic Party has to be concerned about how poorly the party has performed in rural America over the last few election cycles. On TV, I remember looking at the red and blue counties of America after 2016 and 2020. There are blue coastlines and blue pockets in a largely red sea.

How did it come to be that Democrats are getting politically wiped out in so many rural places? I have seen different statistical explanations. One in Politico said two-thirds of rural voters chose Trump. Another said the Democrats lost 90% of rural counties. Trump actually did better with rural voters in 2020 than 2016. Whatever the numbers actually are, there is a basis for Democrats to be very worried.

It hasn’t always been like this. The red trend in rural America has accelerated over the last decade.

Two young Democrats, Chloe Maxmin and Canyon Woodward, who co-authored the new book, Dirt Road Revival, take up the Democrat/rural voter question. And they do not speak as academics. In 2018, Maxmin and her campaign manager Woodward, flipped a state representative seat in a heavily red district in Maine. Then in 2020, they flipped a state senate seat running against the Maine Republican Senate Minority Leader.

Maxmin and Woodward argue that the Democrats have largely ignored rural America. The Democratic message to rural America: you don’t matter. They say Democrats stopped trying to persuade people who disagreed with them, focusing on running up big margins in urban and suburban areas.

The two young activists point to a long-standing pattern of neglect. In their 2020 campaign they describe how the Maine Senate Democratic Campaign Committee told them it didn’t believe in talking to Republicans. Maxmin and Woodward recognized this as bad politics.They committed to reaching out much more to independent and Republican voters. Their strategy paid off.

Our octogenarian Democratic Party leadership is seriously out of touch. The party keeps losing in rural America but there is incomprehension in the face of the repeated losses. You might think the extent of the losses would lead to some soul-searching. Just the margin of the losses matter.

Many people in rural America see the Democratic Party leadership as elitist and not speaking to their needs. That is also true of the Republican Party leadership but Democrats have held themselves out as fighting for working people.

Democrats need to be self-critical. In the not so distant past, our leaders have called rank and file voters “deplorables” or “clinging to guns and religion”. It was our party leadership under Bill Clinton that presided over Wall Street deregulation, disastrous trade policies, continued de-industrialization of America, and mass incarceration. Neither party has clean hands.

Maxmin and Woodward show a different way forward. They lay out a how-to roadmap for organizing rural America. Maxmin emphasized door-to-door canvassing and the personal touch. She and Woodward dispensed with expensive party campaign consultants and conventional election literature, creating their own original signs and literature.

She focused more on listening than offering solutions. She engaged people in hearing what was on their minds. She was always respectful of people and their views even when she disagreed. She focused on values, not party. Maxmin also ran a 100% positive campaign. She refused to slime her rivals.

During the Covid lockdown in 2020, Maxmin and Woodward organized socially distanced phone banks oriented to relief for seniors who needed help. The campaign connected a network of volunteer drivers to pick up prescriptions for neighbors, deliver groceries, drop off toilet paper or find large-print books for people with eyesight problems who could not access public libraries which were closed. Their campaign was more of a social movement than traditional politics.

Campaigns of all political stripes strive for authenticity. That is why you see candidates shooting guns, wearing cowboy or baseball hats or riding a horse. Even Trump who looks like he sleeps in a suit wears a baseball hat. Maxmin was straight forward as a progressive Democrat. She never hid her views.

In her book, she describes a conversation with a guy who opposed Medicaid expansion in Maine. At first he had told her to get off his property but she persisted in asking him for his perspective. He explained that he had grown up without electricity or running water. He had worked hard to build a life, including buying his own health care. Maxmin thanked him for explaining. She said her support of Medicaid was not to take anything away from his hard work. It was about supporting others who remained in need. At the end of the conversation, the guy said he would vote for her.

Maxmin and Woodward point out the harm of negative stereotypes. There are many Democrats who will, out of frustration, dismiss people as “Trumpers”, “backwards” or “racist”. While there are no doubt many Republicans who will never be won over, that is not true for many others. Finding areas of agreement is possible but the Democrats have to try.

Working people across America have been screwed. Many do not bother to vote, feeling it makes no difference. When Biden ran against Trump he talked about returning things back to some type of normalcy, the way they were before Trump. That view is wrong.

Things are in a far worse and more precarious place than the ancient Democratic leaders seem to realize. Whether it is the climate emergency or the fascist threat to democracy, Democrats must be the Big Change party, recognizing the gravity of our present moment.

As Maxmin and Woodward explain, Democrats have failed to act on an understanding of the class structure of rural America. Too often they have not fought for rural low income or working people who all have the same needs everywhere. Rural families want to close the wealth gap with better incomes. They want their kids to have opportunities. They need broadband, affordable housing, affordable education, student loan debt relief, and universal health care.

But the Democrats have been shrinking violets. They will come up with $40 billion for Ukraine but American restoration remains off the table.

The future of the Democratic Party lies with outstanding young people like Maxmin and Woodward, not with corporate lobbyists tied to Wall Street. The young activists are right that the Party needs to reinvent itself so that we could actually hope to re-take some state legislatures.

The Democrats have an abysmal record at the state level. In 1978, Democrats controlled both chambers in 31 state legislatures. By 2017, that number was down to 13. During Obama’s presidency Democrats lost almost 1000 seats in legislatures. We need to look at that and not accept it.

In rural America, a dirt road revival is the best hope for fighting the Republican authoritarians. The Republicans have utterly debased themselves but the Democrats have only weakly shown themselves worthy. The stakes could not be much higher.

Before Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, there was Walter F. White. From 1931 to 1955, he was a leader of the NAACP. He made an enormous contribution to the cause of civil rights in America but he remains a virtual unknown. White deserves to be far better known.

A big part of the story of American history is filling in the gaps of the conventional story we have been bequeathed. A new biography, White Lies, by A. J. Baime, tries to correct the disappeared record. Walter White’s life was contemporaneous with the Jim Crow era.. White was born in 1893 and he lived until 1955. In his obituary, the New York Times wrote:

“Only five-thirty-seconds of his ancestry was Negro. His skin was fair, his hair blond, his eyes blue and his features Caucasian. He could easily have joined the 12,000 Negroes who pass the color line and disappear into the white majority every year in this country.”

But White always identified as black. His parents were born into slavery. As a teenager, he lived through the Atlanta race riot of 1906. White’s family home was almost torched by a racist mob. That experience left an indelible impression.

As a very young person, White took the initiative to start an NAACP chapter in Atlanta. He invited the legendary James Weldon Johnson, who wrote “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and who was the national leader of the NAACP to come and speak in Atlanta. In that era, the NAACP was considered the most militant organization fighting for civil rights. Johnson was so impressed with White that he recruited him to move to New York City and work for the organization. White arrived in the city in February 1918.

At the same time White arrived in the city, the national NAACP was contending with an epidemic of lynchings, mostly in the South. In Estill Springs, Tennessee, a mob of 1500 people burned a black man, Jim McIlherron, at the stake. McIlherron was believed to have shot and killed two white men. The New York Times reported “hot irons were applied to his body for about ten minutes in an effort to get him to make a confession”. Before he was set on fire, members of the mob unsexed him.

The NAACP telegrammed President Woodrow Wilson and Tennessee’s governor, appealing for them to break the silence and denounce the terrible mob acts. A U.S. assistant attorney general responded that under the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, the federal government had no jurisdiction over matters of this kind. The Tennessee governor said he would only take action if requested by local officers, something that would never happen.

This was the heyday of lynchings and Ku Klux Klan resurgence. Racist crimes were not investigated and perpetrators were never punished. Those who lynched had no apprehension about adverse consequences.

White came up with an idea. Beginning with the McIlherron case, he decided to go South to investigate lynchings as an undercover investigator. Once back home, he would publish his findings. Because of his skin color, he could go to the scene of lynchings and do first hand investigations. He did not find it difficult to penetrate to the heart of these crimes as perpetrators were often willing to talk freely.

Following in the anti-lynching tradition of Ida B. Wells, White published expose after expose in a range of newspapers and magazines. Between 1918 and 1930, White made 41 undercover investigations, repeatedly placing himself in great danger.

On one occasion, he almost got himself lynched. After a racist massacre in Arkansas, word leaked that there was a black man posing as a white reporter. White hightailed it to a train to get out of the South. A mob was looking for him. Not realizing who he was, the train conductor told him he was “about to miss some fun”.

White asked the conductor “What’ll they do with him? The conductor replied “ When they get through with him, he won’t pass for white no more”.

White wrote a book about lynching disputing the false narrative that lynchings were a result of black men sexually assaulting white women. He found that blacks were getting lynched for being successful at business. It was part of a disenfranchisement effort rooted in white supremacy. Lynching was meant to keep black people down through intimidation. White wrote:

“..mobbism has inevitably degenerated to the point where an uncomfortably large percentage of American citizens can read in the newspaper of the slow roasting alive of a human being in Mississippi and turn, promptly with little thought, to the comic strip or sporting page. Thus has lynching become an almost integral part of our national folkways.”

His courage and advocacy were so remarkable that at the age of 36 White was catapulted into national leadership of the NAACP. He pushed hard on both President Roosevelt and Truman to support anti-lynching law. Initially in 1934, FDR would not support the law out of fear it would block the rest of his agenda. He was trying to hold together a coalition that included Southern Democrats. Finally in 1938, FDR supported the anti-lynching bill. Eleanor Roosevelt helped behind the scenes.

Although he was not ultimately successful in passing anti-lynching legislation (that just passed in 2020), White pushed FDR to issue an Executive Order in 1941 that outlawed discrimination in employment. It was the first time the federal government ever issued such an order.

In 1946, this was followed by an Executive Order issued by President Truman creating a President’s Commission on Civil Rights. White had access to the White House and he educated Truman about lynchings and other horrible acts like the blinding of Isaac Woodard. Truman was genuinely shocked and said, “My God! I had no idea it was as terrible as that!! We’ve got to do something”. White succeeded in raising the profile of civil rights as a national issue.

With help from Charles Houston, White also recruited a young Thurgood Marshall to join the NAACP legal staff. To say this move worked out is a giant understatement. In a series of blockbuster cases, Marshall deconstructed laws upholding segregation in education and voting rights. Marshall’s biographer Juan Williams has written that White “opened Marshall’s eyes to the idea of civil rights as theater and the power of using dramatic situations to the NAACP’s advantage”.

About himself, White wrote that he embodied the “enigma of a black man occupying a white body”. Although he was married, he had a long-standing secret affair with a white woman, Poppy Cannon. He divorced his wife and married her. Angry mail poured into the NAACP headquarters. At that time, interracial relationships were far from accepted. White’s reputation took a hit.

In considering why Walter White has been disappeared historically it would appear his affair contributed as did his skin color but any fair assessment must acknowledge his over three decades of outstanding advocacy. White wrote:

“I am one of the two in the color of my skin; I am the other in my spirit and my heart. It is only a love of both which binds the two together in me…I am white and I am black, and know that there is no difference. Each casts a shadow, and all the shadows are dark.”

As the January 6 Committee continues its investigation into the Capitol insurrection, there are some lesser-discussed aspects of the story that deserve more attention.

In their second hearing, the Committee showed that Donald Trump and his campaign raised $250 million dollars for a Trump “Official Election Defense Fund”. That fund did not exist and, in fact, it never existed. The scam began on November 4, the day after the election. By that point, Trump and his aides were well aware he had lost even though the election was not definitively called on TV until November 7. Trump sent out an email from the address contact@victory.donaldtrump.com:

“Friends, the Democrats are trying to STEAL THE ELECTION. I’ve activated the Official Election Defense Fund and I need EVERY PATRIOT, including YOU, to step up and make sure we have enough resources to PROTECT THE INTEGRITY OF OUR ELECTION.”

The Trump team followed with a fundraising email claiming that “President Trump will easily WIN the Presidency of the United States with only legal votes cast”. They asked for supporters to donate any dollar amount to the “Election Defense Task Force”. This was followed by a barrage of emails over a nine week period, as many as 25 a day, pleading with Trump supporters to contribute to prevent the “Radical Left from DESTROYING America” These emails continued until January 6.

In the first week after the election, the Trump campaign raised $100 million. They got donors to kick in $150 million more all supposedly for the goal of helping legal challenges to the election results. However, according to the video testimony of Amanda Wick, the January 6 Committee’s chief investigative counsel, the Trump “Official Election Defense Fund” never existed. This was corroborated by the Committee testimony of two Trump campaign aides Hannah Allred and Gary Coby.

The $250 million was diverted into a new Trump entity, Save America PAC. The PAC made contributions to Trump hotels, to a conservative organization employing former Trump staffers and to the company that organized the rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol on January 6.

Asking for money for election defense and then switching to using it to pay other debts sounds like a fraud. It is a deception and a misrepresentation, bilking your own supporters.

It is significant that many advisors, including Attorney General William Barr, had told Trump there was no voter fraud. According to the video testimony of Jason Miller, a Trump advisor, the campaign’s head of data told Trump “in pretty blunt terms that he was going to lose”. Yet, it did not stop Trump and his organization from aggressively dishing out fundraising emails even when they knew there was no evidence of voter fraud.

The January 6 Committee has subpoenaed the Republican National Committee’s digital marketing vendor, Salesforce, to obtain information about who initiated and signed off on the emails and about the whole fundraising scheme. The Republican National Committee is fighting the subpoena in court.

Paul Ryan, vice-president of policy and litigation with Common Cause has said,

“Donald Trump is a one-man scam PAC. Bait and switch is among his favorite fundraising tactics.”

Most of the public discussion about Trump’s crimes have focused on conspiracy to commit sedition as well as his efforts to intentionally obstruct Congress’s certification of Biden’s win. We never had a President attempt a coup before. Still, the scam fundraising should be considered too. It is not simply unethical – it is mail and wire fraud.

I would compare the crime to the Build the Wall fraud committed by Steve Bannon and his co-defendants. They advertised that fundraised money was going to build the wall between Mexico and the U.S. but it was actually used for other purposes like funding luxury lifestyles. Bannon pled not guilty to pocketing $1 million before he was pardoned by Trump. Two of Bannon’s co-defendants pled guilty and were sentenced to prison.

Mail fraud and wire fraud are both serious federal offenses. They are punishable by $1,000,000 fine or imprisonment up to 30 years. The crime is when a person knowingly devises a scheme to “obtain money” through “false or fraudulent pretenses, representation or promises”. The crimes must be committed through the U.S. mail system or a private delivery service or through phones or emails, among other means.

No doubt it is often difficult for prosecutors to prove criminal intent but a fraud case against Trump and his campaign has a very strong factual basis. As Elie Mystal has pointed out, the Department of Justice could pursue getting records from the RNC’s digital marketing vendor, Salesforce. Maybe Trump himself signed off on the plan for his election defense fund.

Many have pointed out that Trump learned lessons from Roy Cohn, who was his mentor. Trump has generally not been careless about leaving his finger prints at the scene. The Election Defense Fund scam is textbook fraud. It remains unclear if the will and prosecutorial zeal to pursue this case exists at the Department of Justice.

There is tremendous cynicism about our justice system. I think the public expects Big Fish to routinely commit crimes and get away with it. A long time ago, Eugene V. Debs captured the problem. He wrote:

“There is something wrong in this country; the judicial nets are so adjusted as to catch the minnows and let the whales slip through.”

Time will tell if the whale again slips through.