The Election Ignorance of Judge J. Michael Luttig

It is amazing what the effect of dissent from Establishment gospel induces in presumably otherwise sensible adult Americans.

The latest in this craziness on parade comes from retired federal Judge J. Michael Luttig. A George H. W. Bush appointee to the Fourth Circuit, the retired judge, with a heretofore sterling reputation, presented a statement to the corrupt January 6 Committee that was a shining example of either outright ignorance or Establishment contempt for democracy and those millions of Americans who believe the Establishment has corrupted our nation’s most treasured institutions.

Judge Luttig begins by saying this:

A stake was driven through the heart of American democracy on January 6, 2021, and our democracy today is on a knife’s edge.

America was at war on that fateful day, but not against a foreign power. She was at war against herself. We Americans were at war with each other — over our democracy. January 6 was but the next, foreseeable battle in a war that had been raging in America for years, though that day was the most consequential battle of that war even to date.

In fact, January 6 was a separate war unto itself, a war for America’s democracy, a war irresponsibly instigated and prosecuted by the former president, his political party allies, and his supporters. Both wars are raging to this day.

Hello? Where was Judge Luttig after the 2016 election, when the Establishment in its many institutions refused to accept the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s election victory?

Where was Judge Luttig when the Democratic Party and its Establishment allies in the media launched the Trump-Russia collusion hoax? A hoax invented, paid for, and signed off on, as we have learned from the recent testimony of her campaign manager, by Hillary Clinton herself?

Where was Judge Luttig when leftist mobs rioted in the streets after Trump’s election and on the day of his inauguration?

Next up Judge Luttig simply lies about the events of January 6. He says this:

Called to Washington D.C. that day by the president, the president himself, and the president’s followers, supporters, and allies gathered near The White House for a “Stop the Steal” rally. The president maintained at that rally that the 2020 presidential election had been “fraudulently stolen” from him. The president addressed his faithful followers thus: “We’re going to the Capitol…. We’re going to try and give them [the Republicans in the Congress, presumably] the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country…. We will never give up. We will never concede.”

Inflamed, the gathered mob marched up the hill from The White House to the United States Capitol to protest, disrupt and prevent the counting of the electoral votes for the presidency, which the president falsely charged were wrongly about to be counted by the Congress in his political opponent’s winning favor and in his own losing favor.

To be blunt: This is 100 percent bunk.

As I have noted in this space before, I personally was at that White House rally, with a literal front-row seat. I heard the president’s speech from beginning to end. Note well, Judge Luttig never notes that the president specifically said to the crowd to go and “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

In fact, not only did that part of the president’s speech not make Judge Luttig’s statement, it was, as Ohio’s Republican Congressman Jim Jordan has noted, also edited out of the committee’s video of that event. Imagine that.

I did not go to the Capitol but returned to my hotel room to do a television interview and a Zoom call with a Pennsylvania newspaper. But at no time was anyone in my vicinity at the White House rally — which included thousands of people — suggesting anything close to violence. In fact, people were dancing to the rock music blaring through the loudspeaker. But that doesn’t make it into the judge’s statement. He has swallowed liberal media garbage about that rally hook, line, and sinker.

It is worth noting that even MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow didn’t swallow this nonsense. Said Rachel to fellow host Chris Hayes recently:

Just a key point, that yes, there was a pro-Trump rally at which the president spoke. And we can absolutely talk about all the things the president said there.

But the idea that that rally is the thing that got out of hand and that somehow resulted in the breaching of the capitol —

That rally was very far from the capitol and the people who, as you say, did the initial breach, that allowed everybody else to come in, they never even went to that rally.

Bingo.

Judge Luttig also says that Trump “had lost fair and square and as to which there was not then, and there is not to this day, evidence of fraud.”

No evidence of fraud? Seriously?

As I have said previously here in The American Spectator, anyone who believes such a bald untruth owes it to themselves to read investigative reporter Mollie Hemingway’s Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.

As I noted, Mollie uses exhaustive detail to document that “there are abundant reasons to suspect the election was rigged at every step”:

Those “abundant reasons to suspect the election was rigged at every step” include the following 2020 events just from my home state of Pennsylvania alone:

• The Trump campaign in Philadelphia, per a Commonwealth Court judge, was deprived of its “statutory right to have poll watchers present at places where electors cast and submit votes in person” and in “unparalleled” numbers.

• Ballot harvesting is not allowed in Pennsylvania. Yet Philadelphia allowed it. The notoriously partisan Democrat Attorney General Josh Shapiro — now the Democrats’ nominee for governor in the 2022 election — said that objecting to ballot harvesting was now suddenly “illegal voter intimidation.”

• The Democrat Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled the “Democrats in Philadelphia did not have to allow the Trump campaign any observation of the vote counting.”

• “The Trump campaign had a legal right to observers within a reasonable distance from the counting,” Mollie writes. “Why did election officials in overwhelmingly Democratic Philadelphia go out of their way to deprive the campaign of that right?”

Since Judge Luttig has chosen to jump into this discussion in this way, he has revealed that he is either willfully or unintentionally abysmally ignorant about my home state’s abysmal history of voter fraud that goes way beyond 2020.

As I have documented here, Pennsylvania elections in 1994, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2015, and 2016, all had voter fraud. As a retired federal judge, Judge Luttig should have been aware of this New York Times story from 1994 that, speaking about a then-sitting federal judge in Philadelphia, said this:

Saying Philadelphia’s election system had collapsed under “a massive scheme” by Democrats to steal a State Senate election in November, a Federal judge today took the rare step of invalidating the vote and ordered the seat filled by the Republican candidate.…

Judge Newcomer ruled that the Democratic campaign of William G. Stinson had stolen the election from Bruce S. Marks in North Philadelphia’s Second Senatorial District through an elaborate fraud in which hundreds of residents were encouraged to vote by absentee ballot even though they had no legal reason — like a physical disability or a scheduled trip outside the city — to do so.

And, as Judge Luttig should be aware, just days ago this headline came out of the Department of Justice:

Former U.S. Congressman and Philadelphia Political Operative Pleads Guilty to Election Fraud Charges

With all of this on the record, I can hardly believe that someone as highly regarded as Judge Luttig would make this kind of statement to the January 6 Committee, a committee that is itself nothing more than a corrupt lynch mob designed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to do one thing and one thing only: smear Donald Trump.

There are only two possible answers. Either Judge Luttig is ignorant of the facts, or he believes that the Establishment’s war on millions of Americans who disagree with them is justified.

And if democracy dies as a result? He’s signing on for it.