 Donald Trump has been indicted again. This is the fourth instance and this time it's on charges of election subversion. What is the case about? Argentina's pre-election primaries threw up a stunner with a far right-wing candidate emerging on top. Who is Javier Millay? This is daily debrief on People's Dispatch. These are our stories for today. And if you're watching this on YouTube, don't forget to hit that subscribe button. Former U.S. President Donald Trump has been indicted again. It seems like every two weeks brings a new indictment and this is his fourth one. The charges this time are from the state of Georgia where Trump and his associates are accused of election subversion in 2020. Now Trump has been charged under the state's racketeer influencer, influenced in corrupt organizations that is RICO law. The case is based on calls he made to a top state official in 2020 seeking to flip the state which ended up voting for his opponent Joe Biden. We have with us Eugene Purir to understand the case and what this means for Trump and the U.S. Eugene, so thank you so much for joining us. Indictment number four for Donald Trump and almost every month one seems to come up. And there are a lot of questions. We'll come to that. But first of all, I wanted you for the benefit of viewers to give a bit of detail about what specifically this one is about. We know it's in the state of Georgia, the 2020 elections. So what is Donald Trump accused of doing? Donald Trump is being charged by the state of Georgia and a set of cases that are very similar to the federal charges people may have heard of and they are essentially accusing him through a range of different counts of trying to overturn the legal results of the election of 2020. So there are a number of things that they're pursuing him on, but it includes, you know, attempting to form a slate of individuals who were illegally challenging the election results, intimidating election officials trying to get them to the election results, just in general intimidating people lying about a number of different things in terms of statements that were made by individuals who they are arguing were operating under the direction of Trump about the election results. So what it really all boils down to even though there is a range of different charges I believe 30 individual charges is that Donald Trump is being charged individually for his own actions vis-a-vis the 2020 elections, and as they say to fraudulently overturn the elections, and he's also being charged as the head of a criminal conspiracy, which is saying that everyone who was working for Donald Trump in this process in Georgia to attempt to overthrow, overturn the elections illegally or fraudulently as the court is alleging as the prosecutors are alleging. You know, we're a part of essentially a mafia. I mean, that's the type of law that they're actually using the RICO law that was designed against mafias and criminal organizations. So Trump being charged an individual and the head of a criminal enterprise, but for the same thing. And that is various attempts to intimidate election officials and manipulate the various statistical results in order to change the result of the election on knowing that in fact he did not win. Right. So we've actually seen a lot of reporting on this specific issue. I believe, you know, there are records of him calling the Georgia, Georgia Secretary of State, if I'm not mistaken. You know, there's been the he himself has spoken out and the person concerned, I believe was a Republican as well. So there's been a lot of documentation of Georgia, specifically some of the conversations that happened around the election. But in legal terms, what happens after an indictment, you know, what is what is required for say a conviction? What is the process ahead? Well, now that he's been indicted, the trial process will essentially begin. So there's going to be some extended skirmishing around the issue of when the trial will take place, where and how it will take place. There's obviously will be a jury selection process, which will be, you know, very novel. I mean, this is a very interesting case raising a lot of interesting legal perspectives. And then ultimately, once all those kind of preliminaries are set forward, they will set a date for the trial and then he will go to trial and then these claims will be adjudicated for Trump to be convicted. Individually, they're going to have to prove several different things, but basically they're going to have to prove that he knew he did not win, and that all of his actions were asking people to do things that he knew were illegal vis-a-vis the election process. And also, there will be a chance for him to be held guilty, even if they can't prove what he knew personally that all these other individuals that they have charged were operating under his direction and they just didn't have to be able to prove that he told them to do something, or that they were under the impression that he was telling them to do something, to convict him, essentially not for the crime itself, but for directing others to commit the crimes of intimidation, of false record keeping, and all of these different various issues. So they're essentially going to try to prove two different things. I mean, one sort of what Trump himself knew and what he was directing, but also beyond that, that he was directing other individuals. Essentially what they're doing is making sure if they can't prove Trump himself knew all the different pieces, they can say, well, he directed these other people so that no one can come into court and say, well, I just did it on my own. It wasn't Trump. It wasn't this. If they can prove that they were communicating about it, they can say that he was directing them. So Rico especially is known for being a very low bar for conviction. He was sort of designed to capture mafia bosses, gang leaders who have all their minions doing all the work for them, but under their direction. So, these cases are usually seen as pretty easy in a general sense if you can prove they were communicating with people who didn't commit a crime, but we'll have to see all of this come out in court and there's going to be a lot of novel issues. No president has ever been charged like this before. So who knows how it's going to play out but that's what will happen. We'll see, you know, probably over the next several weeks, the preliminary issues, then they'll set a date for trial probably early next year and then he will go to trial and all the claims will be adjudicated. Right. So Eugene, like I said, like we said, there are four indictments right now. There's another federal case, like you said, regarding the elections, one I believe on secret documents and one on the kind of certain payments. But do any of these actually significantly bar Donald Trump from holding political office from running for president from politics as such? They don't. So Donald Trump, even if he was convicted and sent to jail before the election would still have the right to run for election and if he won, he could in fact, commute his own sentence and pardon himself. So to some degree, the electoral process is the real court here because no matter what happens in these legal cases, if he wins the election, he can then immunize himself from any possible consequence that he would face. Now he could be excluded as a voter in his home state as a convicted felon. I believe he's registered to vote in Florida now and there's a range of different laws around that. So it's possible that he could actually run for the election. He's registered to vote in Florida, which does allow felons to vote if you meet certain things. That's kind of the irony of the U.S. electoral process. He could be actually barred from voting, but he could in fact still win and in fact then pardon himself for the crime. So theoretically, this all is setting itself up to make an even bigger political issue because for his own supporters, they can essentially get him out of trouble if they're able to get across the finish line there in 2024. Right, now coming to the political aspect of this, definitely the Democrats are planning to use this as a big electoral point in the coming elections because like you said, many of these cases, I guess, go into trial more towards the end of the year, early 2024 when really the campaign also begins to heat up. So I suppose the idea is also to kind of bind him down in these processes. But it does seem that in terms of the Republican vote, basically there's not too much of an impact because he seems to be very popular. The most recent poll I've seen which was from just before the Georgia charges, but after the federal charges so that only 16% of Republicans agreed with the charges. So it seems that he is pretty unassailable amongst the reputation is unassailable amongst the Republican voter base they seem to want him to be the president. None of the other candidates are coming anywhere close to him in any poll poll after poll after poll. So it's always possible things could change when the trials themselves start perhaps that could influence people, but it does seem pretty set in stone that the Republican base and Republican voters have decided they want Donald Trump, and they want to take these issues to the ballot box because they believe that he is being unfairly persecuted. And so I think that is also driving Republican support for Trump, because they ultimately feel like this is so unjust, we can't drop him for another candidate. We have to, you know, take the fight into the electoral season against, you know, the forces they've used to be a raid or raid against them. Not to mention that I suppose a lot of people also believe that he didn't lose the election in the first place in 2020. Yes, I think there's a number of these Republicans who somehow think it's true. Unfortunately, they are deeply diluted I mean is 100% false he absolutely lost the election. Almost all of his top campaign officials by the way, stated under oath that they actually believe that he lost the election so all the people working around him, including some of the people who tried to subvert the electoral process and even when you start to look as realistic as it was I mean you've got these claims that there were tens of thousands of ballots shipped from China, that Hugo Chavez, you know over 10 years ago illegally set up voting machines to somehow rig them against Donald Trump. So I mean it's so fantastical and so many different levels but things have become so partisan that I think there are many supporters of Donald Trump who just couldn't believe that he could possibly lose to Joe Biden and have allowed themselves to sort of be diluted and be willfully ignorant about it because it makes them feel more secure about their own political choices and I think they may be you know ruin the day that they were were believing this if you know when we see what happens next year where I think this could really hurt Trump in terms of the broader population. Thank you so much Eugene ironic because on the one hand you see that you know there is there are all these arguments going about the going on about the election on the other like you pointed out many times on people's dispatch significant efforts being made to actually restrict the number of people who can vote which is probably a larger threat to the election system, then what these many of these diluted people might be concluding. It is very true there's millions of people every year sometimes as many as 5 million people that are not allowed to vote because of criminal convictions. You've got a huge range you know almost 30 states with all sorts of restrictions on, you know the ideas that are needed to vote the you know creating all rules about if you have an absentee ballot if you don't initial it in a certain way, then the vote doesn't count and so we're seeing in critical states, including Florida including Wisconsin, including North Carolina which are critical swing states. You know, significant efforts to present prevent people from voting, as well as significant gerrymandering to prevent at the lower levels the congressional on the state levels, the possibility of Republicans to maintain control of congressional delegations and of state senators, even if they're not able to get the majority of votes in terms of their party by manipulating the, the various electoral constituencies the lines of the electoral constituencies so from top to bottom we've seen a massive assault on voting rights here in the United States over the past five to 10 year striking of 10s of millions of people from the voter rolls over the course of the past decade. So so many little tricks and different things that are really the real issue as it concerns the issue of the integrity of voting in America. Unfortunately the right wing has been able to hijack the issue with their false claims of election elections being stolen, none of which has ever been substantiated in any way shape or form by any study at any time. Right. Thank you so much for talking to us and giving us an update on what's happening on this front we I suppose we'll keep hearing more about this the coming months as well. Thanks so much. Thank you. We next go to Argentina where the pre-election primaries called the Paso were held on August 13th. Voting in the Paso helps each coalition of front decide their candidates. In what was a shocking result the far right wing candidate Javier Millay won the highest number of votes which is about 30%. Now Millay campaigns on an extreme platform. He's been described as a libertarian and position himself as an outsider and as you can guess is an admirer of Donald Trump. Argentina is facing a massive economic crisis and Millay seems to be capitalizing on it. For more we have with us Zoe Alexandra. Zoe thank you so much for joining us so maybe first of all could you take us through what happened in the Paso on August 13th. Well this Sunday in Argentina on August 13th were the primary open simultaneous and mandatory elections also known as the Paso which in some context are primary elections and these in these elections. People were able to go to the polls and select the candidates who would stand in the main presidential elections and the general elections which will take place on October 22nd. And these were very these are always very important elections because while they're not binding and while they're not electing people necessarily. They're giving sort of a temperature check on where the support of the population is it's sort of like a more formal opinion poll. If you want to say it like that. And the results in these elections were quite shocking really for many sectors of society. They did not line up for example with the opinion polls that have been taking place in Argentina and the biggest shock was the victory or the lead that was taken by Javier Millay who's from the Liberty party a far right Libertarian party some classified as ultra liberal. Others say it's fascist. Essentially it's a party that has extremely extremely radical proposals for Argentina that attempts to completely attack the system of rights. Access to education access to healthcare and other such things in his speech following these elections Javier Millay said that in as opposed to the slogan of every time there's a need to the right he says that those rights must be paid for. And so it's essentially this this vision that the state should not guarantee anything he also calls for the disappearance of the central bank in Argentina. He calls for the dollarization of the economy, alongside a lot of other extremely extremely backwards in a sense social ideas and positions about gay people about women about the access to abortion. So he's a very threatening candidate to the lives of many Argentinians this is cause a real shockwave in society especially as I said that the opinion polls were not expecting this. The other results from these elections were of course the selection of the final candidates for the two major coalitions which would be the together for change coalition which is the coalition at Mauricio Makri led in 2015 to 2019 when he was president of Argentina. This saw that his former ministry minister of security Patricia Bullrich. She was able to clinch the nomination. She famously was responsible for different security policies. The heavy repression of protests of the Mapuche people in the south of Argentina in the Patagonia region, which resulted in met a lot of violence and infamously the disappearance the force disappearance and assassination of Sergio Maldonado. She's a very divisive figure in Argentina. So that was on one hand and then again the progressive centrist coalition the current ruling coalition, which was relaunch as the union for the homeland also selected their ticket which is going to be led by the minister of finance Sergio Massa. Again, this was a candidate that was endorsed by Cristina Fernández, a kitchener. He was facing up against Juan Garaboy who was a popular leader from workers movements in the country. He's hoping to be able to bring some of that agenda into Sergio Massa's agenda to be able to combat some of these far right populist ideas that Javier Mele is bringing that's responding to different sections of the study that feels sort of abandoned. So those are the major outcomes of Sunday's elections. And like you said a very surprising result. Could you also maybe take us through what are some of the factors that may have actually contributed to this result. We know Argentina is going through a very severe economic crisis. So it is again it is of course a very unexpected result, but there have been a lot of analysts again after these results came up. Many people were shocked it also came amidst a very very tense moment in Argentina. Days before a young girl if their 11 year old girl had been killed by people were attempting to rob her in her neighborhood while she was walking to school. This really shook the nation and it actually provoked a response from right wing sectors to say, And this is why we need more security we need more police. All of these progressive governments have been loose on crime. They don't want to prosecute teenagers. And so there's really been this this whiplash and response this horrific crime, which again has many many socioeconomic factors behind it as well that we won't even go into right now. But this is this really set the stage for this fire right response to this. There was also the killing of a protester on Friday. This was also extremely devastating for people in Argentina. Sorry on Thursday, and it really also impacted the populace the consciousness this was he was actually killed by police while he was being arrested. So this was also very brought another element into this context but overall, we know that from 2015 2019 when Mauricio Macri was in office, he essentially implemented an extremely extremely brutal and harsh neoliberal economic regime, cutting ministries cutting social services, taking out billions of dollars and loans from the IMF. This was extremely detrimental to Argentinian economy. And for example, the left pre candidate one guy boy has consistently called for this debt to be canceled for the government to not pay this debt. Argentina is now forced to dedicate a lot of its public spending towards paying back this debt. Very very challenging. And so this is another factor that when the front of those government took over in 2019 with a lot of promise saying that we're going to leave this neoliberal period we're going to have better times. We're going to reverse all of these setbacks that took place under Mauricio Macri where when he entered office there was no external debt, and that of course increase exponentially. He increased the number of people living under a line of poverty, the number of people living in the street homeless. So all of these things, there was great promise with the front of those government. But of course the pandemic came, they were inheriting, taking on a country with really, really difficult circumstances, structural issues that couldn't be reverted so quickly. A very, very, very staunch and stubborn right wing that did not want to allow any of these structural economic decisions to really go forward. We can remember in the very early in the government when the government tried to take over as it was defaulting on its payments. There was a very strong reaction from the right wing, and that really marked the course for the government it was really only able to take sort of timid measures it negotiated the loan with IMF. And many people in Argentina haven't seen their situations drastically get better or see any real material advances for their situation and so this has kind of given them the sense that okay well, it might not be the Mauricio Macri government may have brought this neoliberalism, but the progressive government was unable to make my situation any better so it's a very, very difficult situation in Argentina. The next couple of months leading up to the general elections in October are going to be very, very tense. Javier Millay has already announced that he was in dialogue with the IMF. He's trying to make agreements with Patricia Bullrich. It's going to be a very, very, very tight contest leading up to these elections. People are extremely worried about what these implications could be. So we'll definitely be following up people's dispatch and so stay tuned over there. Thank you so much Zoe for the updates. I guess we'll come back to you quite soon for further developments in the election as the campaign heats up as well in the run up to the October elections. And that's all we have in today's episode which turned out to be one about two far right wing candidates. We bring you such news from around the world of elections, of struggles by people, movements, of issues of geopolitical interest. So do go to our website peoplesdispatch.org, subscribe to our YouTube channel, watch all our videos and we'll see you tomorrow.