Six Nevada Republicans signed a forged certificate declaring Donald Trump the winner of a state he lost. They handed it in as if it were the lawful vote of Nevada. The Attorney General charged them with forgery and offering a false instrument for filing or record. On Thursday a judge dismissed the case. Four cases against fake electors. Four dismissals. Again, on schedule, right on time.
I have watched this movie since Nixon. The actors change, the script doesn’t. You commit a fraud on the public record, the prosecution takes its time, the political moment passes, and you walk. The mechanism doesn’t have to prove you innocent. It only has to outlast the political moment.
The Arizona case went the same way. Attorney General Kris Mayes dismissed her own prosecution of the slate-falsifiers in June, after the Arizona Supreme Court forced the case back to a grand jury on procedural grounds that left her no good options. She says she’ll try again. Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows were among the named defendants. The Michigan case was dismissed. The Georgia case was dismissed.
The defense will say what it always says — dismissed on procedure, not on the merits. As if procedure and merit live in separate rooms. They do not. The procedure is the architecture. The procedure is how the forgery outlasts the forgery charge.
I’ll set aside, for the moment, what they thought they were doing. The documents say what the documents say. They are forged — that is what the charge alleged. The signers said they were not. A jury will not get to decide which is true.
It has worked this way for decades. Charles Keating looted Lincoln Savings; the 1989 collapse cost taxpayers $3.4 billion, the largest of more than a thousand S&L failures, and some 23,000 mostly elderly bondholders lost about $250 million. Asked whether the roughly $1.3 million he had spread among five U.S. senators bought influence, Keating said he hoped so. He went to prison in 1992, served about four and a half years before his federal conviction was overturned on a technicality in 1996, then pleaded guilty in 1999. He was the last S&L executive to do any time. Twenty years later HSBC laundered money for Mexican drug cartels and sanctioned regimes — Iran, Cuba, Sudan, Libya, Burma — and walked with a deferred prosecution that cost the bank $1.256 billion in forfeitures and $1.9 billion in total. No individual went to jail. Senator Grassley said the bank had “quite literally purchased a get-out-of-jail-free card.” In 2020 Wells Fargo settled for $3 billion over millions of unauthorized accounts opened in customers’ names under sales-quota pressure. The agreement was reached, as the press noted, “with the bank itself, not with any individuals responsible for the fraud.” Former CEO John Stumpf was fined $17.5 million and barred from banking. The corporation paid with shareholders’ money. Nobody served.
The arrangement works exactly as designed. In-group protected, out-group bound. The law does not bind them the way it binds you. A kid who shoplifts a candy bar faces a court date. Six men who signed a forgery to overturn an election get a dismissal. The blindfold has slipped. The thumb is on the scale. It always has been.
The forgery charge walked. The forgery itself remains in the public record. That is the verdict — not the judge’s. The system’s.