“in or around the latter half of 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators, through their personas, began to encourage U.S. minority groups not to vote in the 2016 U.S. presidential election or to vote for a third-party U.S. presidential candidate.”
Just before the election, a
senior Trump campaign official told Bloomberg Businessweek, “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” in which Hillary Clinton’s “1996 suggestion that some African-American males are ‘super predators’ is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent black voters from showing up at the polls — particularly in Florida.”
Trump even had the audacity
during one of his thank you rallies to laud his voter suppression efforts and thank black voters for not voting:
“They didn’t come out to vote for Hillary. They didn’t come out. And that was a big — so thank you to the African-American community.”
What happened in this election wasn’t just a political crime, it was specifically a racialized crime, and the black vote was a central target.
https://nyti.ms/2C47yx6