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Technically I said fraud not defraud, so that makes me the best kind of correct. Here is the relevant Georgia law, since you are a big fan.
That said, as humorous as you are, you are still wrong. What do you think is involved in the theft? Let's use our imaginations and imagine that Donald Trump says to the official who controls election data, "hey, it's me, Donald Trump, your favorite president. Way better than Carter, obviously. Anyway, I suspect there was fraud in your state, so I need access to your voter data, please send it to me by December 1st." If the official then sends Trump the election data, do you think he would be guilty of theft?
I'm going to skip the part where you answer. The only way Trump and his allies "defrauded the state" in the case at hand is if they falsely claimed that they had the right to voter data.
How is that law in any way relevant? Neither Trump nor his co-conspirators have been charged with it.
I am once again begging you to read the actual statute.
They are guilty of conspiracy to defraud the state if they agree to steal something and commit an overt act in the furtherance of the conspiracy. It's got nothing to do with what they claim or don't claim.
The first person to use the word fraud (without de-) was you. You stated that you didn’t think deception was an element. I commented that fraud would seem to always involve deception. That’s why it’s relevant.
I’ll ask you once again to consider the method by which Trump stole the relevant voter data. It involved lying. A lot. Do you think Trump would have been charged with theft if his claims about the election had been true? The indictment sure makes it seem like the fact he was lying is relevant.
Also, stepping back for a second, there are so many counts in the indictment related to forgery, false documents, and false statements, I don’t know how you managed to start a debate over the one count that (arguably, in your opinion) doesn’t involve deception.
No, it was you. Here.
You seem to get confused easily.
I didn't start that debate. You did. You came into the thread arguing that the false electors could not have been guilty of fraud because they didn't deceive anyone. I responded by pointing out they hadn't been charged with fraud, and the only charge mentioning fraud didn't involve the false electors and didn't include deceit as an element of the offence.
…at which point, I wrote that it’s hard to imagine a definition of fraud that would not involve deceit.
...which is both wrong and completely irrelevant.
Well, it may be wrong, but so far I’ve provided one definition of fraud from Georgia law and another from Merriam Webster that include deceit. You haven’t provided one that doesn’t.
Apart from the one that someone's actually been charged with.
From the indictment:
Read the above and recall that what AshLael wants anyone still reading this to believe is that for the purposes of the Georgia indictment, it makes no difference whether in creating the alternative slate of electors (aka "fake electors"), the accused parties intended for the "CERTIFICATE OF THE VOTES" to deceive Congress into wrongly counting Georgia's votes for Donald Trump.
To echo a favorite line of mine, I cannot imagine an interpretation of the phrase "with the intent to defraud," or really the entire context and meaning of Count 11 and several other counts like it, that would make AshLael's position reasonable.
Whether the intent of the "fake elector" document was to deceive Congress matters to the legal case. Of course it matters. Anyone who says differently either hasn't read the indictment or is a troll.
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