Stefanik cheers on another Trump indictment

By Ken Tingley

Rep. Elise Stefanik defended Donald Trump after he was indicted for a fourth time Monday night.

“This is another rogue Far Left radical District Attorney weaponizing their office to target Joe Biden’s top political opponent President Trump,” Stefanik told Fox News digital.

Just more politics, she insisted.

Remember, it was Stefanik on Jan. 6 who objected to Georgia’s election results in Congress. In a written statement at the time, she said “more than 140,000 votes came from underage, deceased, and otherwise unauthorized voters — in Fulton County alone.”

When Stefanik made her accusations, it was already known that Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had found just two fake ballots, not 140,000.

Five months later Stefanik was still repeating the same charges and insisted they were true.

Surely by now, our congresswoman is familiar with the story of Atlanta election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea “Shaye” Moss. If not, she can read about them in the first of the 41 Georgia indictments against Trump and his supporters.

Trump mentioned Freeman’s name more than 20 times during a call to Raffensperger while pressuring him to change the vote totals in Georgia. Trump called Freeman a “professional vote-scammer and hustler” in the call to Raffensperger and was still talking about her in January.

Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, mentioned Freeman and Moss prominently while talking to the Georgia state Senate and showed a doctored video he said implicated them in voter fraud. Giuliani accused the two workers of passing around USB drives at State Farm Arena in in Atlanta in order to provide more votes to candidate Joe Biden.

The reaction from Trump supporters was ugly.

Threats against the pair of election workers drove them from their homes and into hiding.

“I lost my name, I’ve lost my reputation. I’ve lost my sense of security – all because a group of people, starting with Number 45 (Donald Trump) and his ally Rudy Giuliani, decided to scapegoat me and my daughter, Shaye, to push their own lies about how the Presidential election was stolen," Freeman told the Jan. 6 Committee.

Stefanik contributed to their misery with her own words.

She perpetrated a fraud to her constituents and anyone who heard her accusations.

The two election workers were quickly cleared by state officials.

In July, Giuliani conceded he made false statements about the two election workers.

"Giuliani's stipulation concedes what we have always known to be true — Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss honorably performed their civic duties in the 2020 presidential election in full compliance with the law; and the allegations of election fraud he and former-President Trump made against them have been false since day one," their lawyer Michael Gottlieb said in a statement. "While certain issues, including damages, remain to be decided by the court, our clients are pleased with this major milestone in their fight for justice, and look forward to presenting what remains of this case at trial."

I have not seen anything from Stefanik indicating she might have been wrong about the Georgia voting.

“Rudy Giuliani, and their allies start spreading terrible lies about my mother and me. They said we snuck ballots into the State Farm Arena in a suitcase. That’s not true. They said we lied about a water main break to kick observers out. That’s not true. They said we counted ballots multiple times to try to steal an election. That’s not true. And they said we passed around a flash drive to try to hack a machine. That’s not true," she told the Jan. 6 Committee. "The thing they got so excited about, that my mom passed to me, was a ginger mint, her favorite candy. None of the lies are true. They don’t even make sense."

Rep. Elise Stefanik is trying to be a big-time player in national politics. In this case, regular people got run over, and what’s worse, Rep. Stefanik doesn’t seem to care.

Read her breathless over-the-top defense of Trump and 18 others being indicted and it’s hard to believe she really believes what she is telling the public.

Two years ago in a National Review article, Sally Bradshaw, the former chief of staff for Jeb Bush, said she was shocked by Stefanik’s allegiance to Donald Trump.

“Her embrace of Donald Trump defies logic. I’ve never seen a more striking case of reverse evolution,” Bradshaw said in the article. “I am saddened to know that she cares about power more than principle, but there is simply no other explanation for her behavior. She’s too smart to be this dumb.”

Power over principle.

This is the debate we need to have about Rep. Stefanik.

Do her actions reflect the morality of her constituents?

Do we believe the entire legal system is corrupt?

You have to wonder if Stefanik has spent even a moment wondering how her actions, her false statements affected the lives of two regular election workers in Atlanta?

“There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere,” Freeman told the Jan. 6 committee. “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United Sates target you? The president of the United States is supposed to represent every American, not to target one.”

Our congresswoman is supposed to represent all of us, too.

Four different sets of indictments in four different jurisdictions and Stefanik attributes it to a vast liberal conspiracy without a shred of evidence.

Her support of Trump continues to undermine rule of law and will gradually reduce confidence in our own county prosecutors.

Indictments are brought by independent citizens serving on grand juries. And while district attorneys are elected and belong to political parties, they won’t last long doing political favors no matter how small.

Conviction rates for district attorneys, including those in the North Country, are usually more than 95 percent because the vast majority of those charged have broken the law.

With each indictment against Trump and his supporters, it becomes increasingly clear wrong-doing has been done. The Georgia indictments make that especially clear.

You just have to look at how Rudy Freeman and Shayne Moss’s lives were turned upside down; how they received death threats.

Freeman and Moss were regular people just trying to do a job.

Knowing those facts today, our congresswoman still acted as a cheerleader for Trump Monday night.

It’s long past time for the Republican leaders across the district to denounce Stefanik’s politics that put regular working class people in danger. Or at least get her to explain her actions.

It’s long past time for her to tell the voters if she believes in the rule of law, if she believes there is mass corruption in the legal system.

This is not politics.

Stefanik is helping to ruin people’s lives.

She is tearing down our most important institutions.

She’s supposed to be making people’s lives better, not worse.