Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis must be drooling.

In a dark day for America, Democrats made President Joe Biden’s chief political rival fly to their stronghold of Atlanta, surrender to law-enforcement officials, and get photographed and fingerprinted like a common criminal.

Consequently, Willis and her fellow Democrats now boast a mugshot of former President of the United States Donald Trump. They will deploy it in campaign ads from now until Armageddon. It probably already inhabits dart boards in the White House and the Democrat National Committee.

The next step in Trump’s persecution will be Willis’ Stalinesque show trial. Exhibit A will be Trump’s allegedly illegal phone call on Jan. 2, 2021. America’s lying left-wing media already have made this conversation notorious.

• “In recorded call, Trump pressures Georgia official to ‘find’ votes to overturn election,” Reuters huffed in a headline the next day.

• ABC News growled: “Trump demands Georgia secretary of state ‘find’ enough votes to hand him win.”

• National Public Radio snarled on June 21, 2022: “Former President Donald Trump famously pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, to overturn the state’s presidential election result in a January 2021 phone call that lasted more than an hour.”

Willis, these “news” outlets, and other Trump haters want Americans to believe that Trump told Raffensperger, “I want you to fabricate 11,780 votes,” or less nefariously, “I want you to find me 11,780 votes.”

Trump said no such thing.

According to a Washington Post transcript, his actual words were: “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.”

That comment, Trumpophobes claim, makes him a criminal.

Nice try!

Trump, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and GOP attorneys Cleta Mitchell and Kurt Hilbert begged Raffensperger and two of his colleagues to investigate reported irregularities.

“I believe it’s about 4,502 voters who voted but who weren’t on the voter registration list,” Trump said. “You had 18,325 vacant address voters.”

“You had out-of-state voters,” Trump added. “They voted in Georgia, but they were from out of state, of 4,925.”

Among these and other ballots that Trump & Co. questioned, the former president merely expressed his desire to locate enough valid votes and disqualify enough fraudulent ones to win. Politicians routinely have asked this in countless close races.

This so-called smoking gun is a toy pistol.

Trump made a wish that Team Raffensperger would locate missing ballots, toss bogus votes, and otherwise count correctly. This, Trump hoped, would yield him 11,780 additional ballots—one more than Biden’s margin of victory—and, thus, score him the Peach State.

This was no more a criminal solicitation than my saying “I just want to find $100,000” would direct you, dear reader, to rob a bank and then FedEx me a thousand Benjamins.

To be clear: Please do not do this.

Trump’s words to Raffensperger were legal. They were perfectly ordinary and precisely how trailing contenders petition election authorities.

Indeed, Raffensperger finally agreed that his general counsel, Ryan Germany, “will be in touch with the other attorneys on this call, Mr. Meadows.”

“Trump was entitled as a candidate to ask a Georgia state official to locate votes that he believes were not counted,” Harvard Law School Emeritus Professor Alan Dershowitz wrote in August 16’s Daily Mail. He represented Democrats in the Bush/Gore Florida recount fiasco.

“During the course of our challenges, many tactics similar to those employed in 2020 were attempted,” Dershowitz explained. “Lawyers wrote legal memoranda outlining possible courses of conduct, including proposing a slate of alternate electors, who would deliver our preferred election results to Congress.”

Dershowitz asked: “But if similar behavior was legal in 2000, how could it be illegal in 2023?”

This bedbug-infested mess confirms that Fani Willis and the rest of the Get Trump gang have turned normal political speech into the criminal persecution of Donald Trump.

The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

The post Fulton County DA’s Anti-Trump ‘Smoking Gun’ Is a Toy Pistol appeared first on The Daily Signal.