Kris Mayes should take a pass on prosecuting Trump (There are plenty of local fish to fry)
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Another day, another indictment of the 45th president of the United States.
Now all eyes turn to Arizona, where Trump and his gang of political misfits tried every which way to put the pinch on our vote, from the presidential Christmas Day phone call to House Speaker Rusty Bowers to the idiot fake electors who did his bidding when all else failed. To the phony audit of Maricopa County’s election results.
One that confirmed that Joe Biden won Arizona, by the way.
So now state Attorney General Kris Mayes is on deck.
Will she or won’t she try to indict Donald Trump?
She won’t. Or put another way, she shouldn’t.
Trump is up to his eyeball with indictments and charges
The pride of the Republican Party is now facing a total of 91 felony charges in four sets of indictments.
He stands accused of falsifying records to hide hush money paid to a porn star. He stands accused of risking national security by keeping highly sensitive classified documents in his Mar-a-Lago sock drawer then trying to cover it up.
And he stands accused, both by federal and Georgia prosecutors, of entering into a conspiracy to steal the 2020 election.
The first indictment in March (the porn case) was the least important yet perhaps the most shocking, given that never before had a former president been reduced to the role of criminal defendant.
The second and third were stunning, given the astonishing, historic and horrifying nature of the charges.
Number of cases is beginning to feel like overkill
By the fourth indictment earlier this week, however, it was beginning to feel like overkill. Like someone was channeling their inner Ralph Waldo Emerson. (“When you strike at a king you must kill him.”)
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis brought a sweeping indictment that charges Trump and 18 others with racketeering, a purported scheme that started just hours after the polls closed with his election night victory speech.
Some might see that speech as more a First Amendment right than a crime – more a matter of ego than intrigue.
Add in a midnight press conference by a Democratic prosecutor who insists that Trump be tried in the middle of a presidential campaign and it all begins to look a tad political.
Beyond the election speech, though, the Georgia indictment lays out 160 other calculated (if, at times, bumbling) acts that sketch out a serious conspiracy, one that originated in Washington D.C. and spread across seven states, including Arizona.
Don't give Trump more reason to claim persecution
The Georgia indictment could be the most damaging of all because Trump cannot win in 2024 without the Peach State.
Just as he likely can’t win without the Grand Canyon State.
Which is exactly why Mayes, a Democrat, should not spend her time going after Trump.
Enough is enough. To pile on at this point is to simply give Trump more ammunition to decry the unfairness of it all.
Here's the motley crew AG Mayes should examine
Mayes should instead concentrate on the Arizonans who were scheming to steal our vote:
The 11 “patriots” who falsely claimed to be duly elected by the state’s voters to cast Arizona's electoral votes for Trump. Among them were Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Kelli Ward; once-and-future state lawmaker Anthony Kern; Jake Hoffman, a digital marketing operator and now state senator; and Tyler Bowyer, a top executive with Turning Point USA who also sits on the Republican National Committee.
The Arizona Republican Party attorney who helped Team Trump flesh out the fake elector plan.
“We would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted,” Phoenix attorney Jack Wilenchik wrote in a Dec. 8, 2020, email to Boris Epshteyn, a Trump adviser who also was working on the fake elector plan.
The 29 incoming and outgoing Republican legislators who signed a letter to Pence and Congress, asking “that the alternate 11 electoral votes be accepted for to Donald J. Trump or to have all electoral votes nullified completely until a full forensic audit can be conducted.”
Some of them may have been duped but certainly the actions of then-Rep. Mark Finchem, who on Jan. 5, 2021, carried the letter to Washington D.C., warrant scrutiny.
Rep. Andy Biggs, who pushed the notion of setting aside electors in Arizona and elsewhere.
Biggs, along with Rep. Paul Gosar, attended post-election White House planning sessions to spitball ways to keep Trump in office.
On Jan. 5, 2021, Biggs texted Finchem, asking for the letter signed by the Republican legislators — the one urging Congress to accept a Republican slate of presidential electors from Arizona, instead of the Democratic slate chosen by voters. The next morning, Jan. 6, 2021, Biggs videoconferenced with Bowers, asking if he would sign on to the letter and support decertifying Arizona’s electors.
Let's not forget the clown show that was election audit
Senate President Karen Fann and the Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan.
While her House counterpart, Speaker Rusty Bowers, was snubbing Trump's requests to overturn the vote, Fann curiously ordered an audit of Maricopa County’s election despite the fact that every pre-and post-election test and audit required by state law turned up no evidence of a problem.
Then she hired Logan, calling him “well qualified” to audit the vote. We now know, both in his experience and in his performance, that Logan wasn’t qualified to audit Fann’s grocery bill, much less the 2.1 million votes cast in Maricopa County.
Two years ago next week, Logan was ordered by the courts to turn over all text messages, emails and other documents related to the audit, in response to a lawsuit filed by The Arizona Republic.
Records thus far released show he was deeply embedded in the drive to throw the election to Trump.
And he still hasn’t released thousands of those public records, many of them his exchanges with Trump’s closest allies and with “Stop the Steal” organizers.
Not even a court-ordered $50,000-a-day fine has motivated him to turn over the records that would shed light on what was really going on behind the scenes inside what Republicans dubbed “America’s audit.”
AG Mayes has plenty of folks to hold accountable
That, alone, should motivate Mayes to dig into what happened here.
She should leave Trump to his 91 felony charges elsewhere and instead focus on the Arizona connection.
This was a carefully planned, meticulously coordinated scheme and an appalling number of Arizonans appear to be in it up to their eyeballs.
They should be held to account.
Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @LaurieRoberts.
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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Arizona should take a pass on prosecuting Donald Trump
