Hahahahaha…
"what digby sez..."
Month: July 2023
Reporters typically don’t write headlines, but…
Is Trump fit to serve? Is Trump fit to serve?
Okay, the question is posed up front in this Politico article:
Donald Trump’s announcement on Tuesday that he expects to soon be a thrice-indicted candidate is forcing GOP candidates to fully contend with the fundamental question of the 2024 presidential primary.
Is the former president fit to reoccupy the office?
Who the hell with a handful of functioning brain cells thinks Trump’s fitness is an open question?
The rest is pointless horse-race coverage about how good GOP contenders are at tiptoeing around referencing Trump’s legal problems on the campaign trail. How do they even mention them without ginning up the Trump base, as one consultant put it.
“This is the kabuki dance they’re going to be doing for months — it ain’t going to be the first time and it ain’t going to be the last time,” said Mike Madrid, the Republican strategist and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. “The kabuki dance is trying to have it both ways while they try to wait for dust to settle on his legal problems.”
But it’s Politico’s headline that set me off, Dan Froomkin-style.
President Joe Biden is focusing on his administration’s significant accomplishments. He’s even received unintentional assistance from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia on that. He clearly appreciates her shout-out.
But Trump’s unfitness for office was a winner for Democrats in 2018 and 2020. Biden does not want to comment on pending independent investigations. But that does not mean Democrats cannot remind their voters at every turn of the stench of corruption Trump brought to the Oval Office, the international embarrassment he was for the country, the aid and comfort he represents to our enemies, and the GOP’s plans for burning the U.S. Constitution like incriminating documents in Mark Meadows’ fireplace.
MI fake electors face criminal charges
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel on Tuesday filed eight felony charges against each of the 16 fake Trump “electors” who participated in the 2020 scheme to overturn the presidential election results in the state. Prosecutors in Arizona and Georgia are also investigating possible crimes involving the GOP electors scheme, and civil lawsuits are underway in in Michigan and Wisconsin. Somebody had to be first with criminal charges. Nessel wins the prize.
Axios reports, “Among those charged include Kathy Berden, the national committeewoman of the Republican Party of Michigan, and Meshawn Maddock, former co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party.”
In Michigan, each Trump elector was charged with eight criminal counts, including forgery, conspiracy to commit forgery and election law forgery. Some of the counts carry sentences of up to 14 years in prison.
In an online video announcing the charges, Nessel noted the 16 Republicans had submitted paperwork to the Senate, National Archives and elsewhere claiming to be the state’s official electors. “That was a lie,” she said.
“Undoubtedly, there will be those who claim these charges are political in nature,” Nessel said. “But where there is overwhelming evidence of guilt in respect to multiple crimes, the most political act I could engage in as a prosecutor would be to take no action at all.”
The 16 people charged, Nessel said in her statement, transmitted false documents to the United States Senate and National Archives “in a coordinated effort to award the state’s electoral votes to the candidate of their choosing, in place of the candidates actually elected by the people of Michigan.”
John Haggard, 82, of Charlevoix told The Detroit News he did not believe there was any policy anywhere that prevented voters from making a “statement.”
“Did I do anything illegal? No,” Haggard said.
But the 16 knew what they were doing was at best highly suspect:
Electors in every state met on Dec. 14, 2020, to cast their votes for president. Since Biden won Michigan by more than 150,000 votes, his electors gathered at the state capitol to cast their ballots. Republicans in Michigan had discussed hiding overnight in the state capitol so they could simultaneously have pro-Trump electors cast a competing set of votes, according to testimony former state GOP chairwoman Laura Cox provided to the Jan. 6 committee. Cox rejected the idea.
By then, Republican leaders knew they had lost a court case over the election and legislative leaders had told them they would not further challenge the results, according to an investigator’s affidavit released Tuesday. The Trump electors met at the state Republican Party headquarters anyway to fill out the paperwork while others were kept out of the room. The Trump electors were told not to bring recording devices and were asked to surrender their cellphones to ensure no one recorded what they did, according to the affidavit.
Donald Trump himself invited Michigan legislators to the White House on November 20, 2020. Did he bring them there to persuade them to overturn the election results? Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and House of Representatives Speaker Lee Chatfield issued a joint statement after the meeting saying that they had uncovered no information that would change the election’s outcome. They would follow normal procedures.
The 16 are charged with crimes for stepping outside those lines. Nessel filed the state charges after waiting for Department of Justice action that is still pending.
“Had she not taken this action,” writes Jennifer Rubin in her column, “she would have been hard-pressed to pursue future cases involving fraudulent documents submitted to the state or election chicanery.” Presidential pardons do not apply to state convictions, she adds.
White Makes Right
This coordinated effort by Republicans to overturn the 2020 election should appear under Wikipedia’s entry for white privilege. Donald Trump sold himself as a white savior who would restore America to a time when it was “great.” That is, to a time of unquestioned white rule: when men were men, women were barefoot and pregnant, children were seen and not heard, minorities knew their place, and Christianity dominated “lesser” faiths.
That these Michiganders and GOP fellow travelers in other states felt entitled to, as Nessel put it, “the candidate of their choosing,” no matter what the majority of voters wanted, is emblematic of that privilege. As is their belief that, being white, they could get away with it.
So far, they have. That thousands of Trump supporters felt entitled to throw a violent, mob tantrum at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, says everything one needs to know about their level of civic and developmental maturity.
Hundreds of those who participated in that Trump-inspired insurrection have been charged, many convicted, and others face trial. It remains to be seen whether as a group they have learned from the experience. Personal growth is not among the values cherished by this bunch.
I’m sure you’ve heard by now that RFK Jr made a preposterous claim over the weekend about COVID being a bioweapon designed to spare Jews and Chinese people which has created quite the brouhaha. His family has spoken out against him (again) and he’s tried unsuccessfully to dance his way out of it. (It’s on video.)
Joe Perticone at the Bulwark points out that he’s still got some important friends, however:
But Kennedy is not without supporters and defenders, and if it seems like most of them are coming from a certain political corner, it’s because that’s exactly what’s happening.
The plurality of Kennedy’s maximum contribution donations are coming from Republicans, many of his media appearances are in the conservative space, and he’s about to receive his biggest megaphone yet—from Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
This Thursday, Kennedy is scheduled to testify at a hearing hosted by the House Judiciary Committee’s select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government. The stated purpose of the hearing is to examine the Biden administration’s “role in censoring Americans, the Missouri v. Biden case, and Big Tech’s collusion with out-of-control government agencies to silence speech.” Kennedy will be speaking alongside Breitbart politics editor Emma-Jo Morris and Louisiana Special Assistant Attorney General D. John Sauer, who is accusing the Biden administration of colluding with social media companies to suppress speech.
Naturally, many are upset that a congressional committee plans to give a mic and an audience to an antisemitic conspiracy theorist. But the line Republicans are taking is that Kennedy must testify, for the good of the Constitution.
“I don’t agree with what he said but we’re not gonna censor him,” Jordan told reporters on Monday. “That’s what Democrats do.” This is not true, though. House Republicans absolutely take action against lawmakers for things they’ve said, as evidenced by the removal of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Mich.) from the Foreign Affairs Committee earlier this year for her past antisemitic comments.
Speaking of antisemitism: On Monday, after condemning purportedly antisemitic remarks critical of Israel by a Democratic representative and calling for Democrats to take “action against their own,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy executed a sharp pivot and told reporters that while he disagrees “with everything [Kennedy] said,” it would be wrong to disinvite him from appearing at the hearing:
The hearing that we have this week is about censorship. I don’t think censoring somebody is actually the answer here. I think if you’re gonna look at censorship in America, your first action is to censor him? Probably plays into some of the problems we have.
Republicans have shown consistent message discipline on the issue, framing any potential disinvitation as a hypocritical attempt at “censorship.” But by keeping Kennedy on the hearing schedule, they’re not simply defending his constitutional right to speak: They’re handing him a microphone, pointing an array of cameras at him, and entering his words into the Congressional Record.
When I spoke to Rep. Dan Goldman of New York, one of the Democrats on the subcommittee, he described the situation in blunt terms:
This is an individual who has repeatedly espoused antisemitic and anti-Asian conspiracy theories, and an official committee of the Congress is not a platform that should be used for him to perpetuate these unfounded and baseless and discriminatory views. . . .
I find it consistent with the Republicans’ misunderstanding of the concept of censorship. The speaker has said that disinviting him would be censoring him. He is of course free to make whatever statements he wants, wherever he wants. But he does not have a right to be a witness in the United States Congress, and by allowing him to have the platform of the United States Congress, the Republican party is tacitly promoting his views, which are very hurtful and dangerous, especially to Jewish and Asian communities.
But Goldman can’t change the hearing’s itinerary, so he plans to probe Kennedy to the best of his ability. “Some of it will depend on what he says. I generally take the view that if their witness is in front of them, I’m prepared to question him,” he says.
Jordan will likely want Republicans to avoid leading Kennedy into a discussion of his beliefs regarding the specific ethnicities the COVID-19 virus may be favoring or singling out.
“We’re gonna talk about the fact that Democrats tried to censor this guy on the third day of the [Biden] administration,” Jordan added. “They sent an email to Twitter saying, ‘Take down this tweet ASAP’ We’re gonna talk about that kind of stuff.”
But Kennedy wants to defend himself, and Jordan may not have a say in which lines of reasoning his guest pursues. It could get hot in there. Tune in on Thursday.
Oy vey…
I’m not actually sure why they are supporting him. Sure, he’s criticizing Biden and I guess they think he’ll turn some Democratic voters against him. (Never doubt the ignorance of the fringe in either party.) But he’s running in the Democratic primary so he isn’t going to affect the general election.
I guess it’s just owning the libs all the way down. It’s all they do.
That they are doing this now, of all times, is just outrageous
With No Labels launching into high gear, with Joe Manchin playing ‘will-he-or-won’t-he”, it appears that we are going to be dealing with this garbage whether we like it or not.
Dan Pfeiffer had a good piece on this :
No Labels is officially launching its effort to throw the election to Donald Trump. On Sunday, the centrist group released its policy agenda, which was credulously covered by the New York Times and others. Yesterday, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin and Jon Huntsman Jr., the former Republican Governor of Utah, headlined a high profile town hall in the battleground state of New Hampshire.
No Labels raised tens of millions of dollars from billionaires who support Donald Trump on the ballot all across the country. I have written before about how a No Labels candidacy could easily tip the election to Trump, but their policy agenda and yesterday’s event highlight the absolute disingenuous grift at the center of No Labels as an organization and centrism as a political strategy.
Centrism’s Core “Values”
The agenda released by Third Way makes clear that liberal, conservative, and even moderate are ideologies, but “centrist” is an identity. No Labels and other centrist organizations are not working towards a set of ideological principles or policy preferences. They simply pick the midpoint between the two parties to indicate to voters — and donors — that they are somehow better than both parties. The goal is to avoid taking a stand and to be as bland and inoffensive to the most people possible. No Labels is peddling political applesauce.
Don’t believe me? Here is how the New York Times described No Label’s policies on the issue of abortion:
A woman must have a right to control her reproductive health, but that right has to be balanced with society’s obligation to safeguard human life.
For the last five decades, particularly in the year since the Dobbs decision, no issue in American politics has been more divisive than abortion. Yet, No Labels takes No Position to avoid being polarizing.
Politics strives to win power to help people based on the principles and ideas that you believe in, but what happens when you believe in nothing? You get No Labels. A billionaire-funded effort designed to enrich the people running it and potentially help Trump return to the White House.
There is No Appetite for No Labels
The No Labels effort to get a centrist, bipartisan candidate on the ballot in 2024 is founded on the premise that a likely rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden presents a unique opportunity for a centrist candidate to ascend to the White House. Of course, none of us want to return to 2020 — one of the worst years in American history. Conversations with voters of all stripes are filled with a sense of dread about having to spend another cycle watching Trump and Biden battle it out. While enthusiasm wanes for a Biden-Trump rematch, the polling doesn’t support No Labels’ contention. For there to be a real opening for a third-party candidate, huge swaths of Democrats would need to be unhappy with Biden, and Republicans unhappy with Trump. That’s not what’s happening. Both Biden and Trump have approval ratings in the low to mid-40s depending on the poll, but they both have the support of approximately 80 percent of voters in their own party. If those levels of support remain steady (and they have been for both candidates for a number of years), there is simply no room for a third-party candidate.
A Doomed Effort
Even if there was some growing grassroots movement for a bipartisan, centrist ticket of billionaire-funded applesauce peddlers, there is still no way for them to win.
Polling conducted by No Labels shows that a hypothetical, generic centrist candidate would receive about 20 percent of the vote. That sounds like a lot compared to the small but decisive number of votes won by third-party candidates like Jill Stein in 2016 and Ralph Nader in 2020. But to understand how far a No Labels candidate is from the White House, just look at recent history. In 1992, businessman Ross Perot leveraged a tough economy, a high deficit, dissatisfaction with President George H.W. Bush, and concerns about Bill Clinton to become a real candidate in the race. Perot dominated the media, was on the ballot in all 50 states, and even participated in the presidential debates. In the end, Perot received 18.9 percent of the vote. The largest share by a third-party candidate in modern political history. However, despite getting nearly one in five voters, Perot received ZERO electoral votes.
This is the problem for No Labels — and how you know that the whole effort is designed to help Trump win. For better or worse (I’d argue for worse), the U.S. presidential election process is built on a two-party system. Electoral votes are winner-take-all. Whether a candidate gets 18 percent like Perot or 0.18 percent like Kanye West, if they get zero electoral votes they do not win a state.. Importantly, the presidency does not go to the person with the most electoral votes — they must win a majority. If a candidate does not get 270 electoral votes, the election is thrown to the House of Representatives. In that process, the House votes by state delegation. The votes of California, a large state with an overwhelming Democratic Congressional delegation, and Wyoming, a small state with a Republican one, are counted equally. Let’s say that No Labels is correct about the viability of their candidate. Under this fantastical scenario, they receive 230 electoral votes while Biden gets 180 and Trump gets 128. But the House, where Republicans control the majority of delegations, would almost certainly award the presidency to Trump. Under our current, constitutionally mandated system, it is close to impossible for someone outside of the two major parties to win the White House. This is why Bernie Sanders, a Democratic Socialist, ran twice for Democratic Party nomination — as opposed to an independent or third party bid.
The Grift
The billionaires and political strategists behind No Labels are fully aware of the folly of their effort. They understand the polls and the Constitution. So, why are they proceeding full speed ahead with a doomed effort?
Some of the people involved are just greedy grifters seeking money and political relevance. They are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to separate naive, rich people from their money. No Labels exemplifies inherent corruption. They pay a company called HarrisX for its polling. HarrisX is owned by Mark Penn who also happens to be married to Nancy Jacobson, the founder of No Labels.
Others are explicitly using No Labels to help elect Donald Trump. It’s not a coincidence that No Labels’ biggest financial supporters also gave millions to Trump. No Labels’ own polling shows that their candidate would take more votes from Biden than Trump.
None of this is subtle. Time to call it out.
Yesterday, the NY Times reported on Donald Trump’s agenda for a second term should we have the misfortune to see him get one. It led with this:
Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.
Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.
Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.
Shocker, right? Well, it would be if you didn’t read this blog because I wrote about this months ago. I don’t reprise it here just because this story has been out there in plain sight for quite some time but because I’m worried that people aren’t paying enough attention to the fact that Trump is not alone in this. The whole party is turning in this direction and it means the fight is not going to end with him. I just hope people understand that.
The ambitious Republican plot to take it all down
Picture if you will, it’s January 21, 2025 and Donald Trump has just been inaugurated for his second term after the Biden interregnum. Yes, it would be a horrific time, not unlike those first horrible weeks in 2017 when over half the country struggled to grasp how it was possible that an ignorant, bombastic, game show host had eked out a win through an electoral college fluke. But those feelings of despair are where the similarities will end. The next Trump administration will be ready to hit the ground running with their leader’s Retribution Agenda and it won’t be because Trump is any more effective at presidential leadership. It will be because right-wing institutions will have spent their four years in the wilderness preparing for their chance to enact a radical overhaul of the federal government unlike anything we’ve ever seen in this country.
Even some members of the GOP establishment are getting nervous:
There was always talk of this among the original Trumpers, even though the president himself didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. Recall former adviser Steve Bannon bellowing about the “deconstruction of the administrative state” and former Attorney General Bill Barr’s assertions of unchecked executive power for example. As it happened, Trump was so far in over his head and ran such a chaotic, scandal-filled administration that they were unable to institute many systematic changes to test their theories but they came away with the knowledge that given another chance with a corrupt demagogue they could make changes to the system that could help them stay in power indefinitely.
Republicans have come to believe that the entire federal government is filled with woke liberals.
There has been a cascade of stories discussing the poor roll out of Trump’s campaign and how he’s still stuck in the repetitive groove of his grievances over the 2016 campaign and his loss in 2020. His appearance on CNN’s generous kick-off campaign rally for him a couple of weeks ago reinforced that idea, as he repeated all his punch lines and the audience cheered and clapped ecstatically. It certainly left the impression that if Trump were to win the election next year we would be in for a repeat of his first term: turmoil, scandal and ineptitude in which the most terrifying consequence is that a crisis hits or someone makes a catastrophic error. Last time, you’ll recall, we got hit with the first deadly global pandemic in a hundred years and Trump publicly told America to take unproven snake oil cures and instructed scientists to look into having people ingest disinfectants since they kill the virus on surfaces.
It was a disaster.
Many people died and many more families were decimated but I fear that too many Americans may think that a rerun of the The Trump Show won’t be a catastrophe since most of us survived his tenure. But it won’t be a rerun. Since the day Trump left the White House for his exile at Mar-a-Lago, well-funded right-wing organizations have been planning the return to power with a fully developed agenda and plan to enact it. All they have to do is put the Sharpie in Trump’s hand to sign what they put in front of him after which he can run out to the cameras and whine and complain about whomever is his target that day as his minions turn the executive branch into a full functioning partisan operation.
Last summer, Axios’ Jonathan Swan wrote a long report on what they’ve been planning:
The impact could go well beyond typical conservative targets such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service. Trump allies are working on plans that would potentially strip layers at the Justice Department — including the FBI, and reaching into national security, intelligence, the State Department and the Pentagon, sources close to the former president say…The heart of the plan is derived from an executive order known as “Schedule F,” developed and refined in secret over most of the second half of Trump’s term and launched 13 days before the 2020 election.
Schedule F is an executive order which would reassign potentially tens of thousands of federal employees they determine to have policy influence so they would lose their civil service protections. Republicans have come to believe that the entire federal government is filled with woke liberals intent on depriving them of their natural right to rule without restraint.
The plan is being produced by a number of Republican groups and coordinated by some names with which you are no doubt familiar, like former Justice Department (DOJ) lawyer Jeffrey Clark, former Devin Nunes and Pentagon staffer Kash Patel, and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows all of whom are caught up in Trump’s legal messes as well. They plan to salt every department with GOP toadies from the military to the DOJ to the Department of Education to the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. And conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation are drawing up lists of candidates. (That same right-wing institution similarly staffed the provisional government in Iraq with young neocons to disastrous results.)
The beauty of this plan is that it doesn’t actually matter if Trump wins again. They can use it just as easily for another Republican. But it would be especially well-suited for Trump’s principal rival Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Time Magazine’s Molly Ball reported on DeSantis’ desire to use every bit of executive power to achieve his goals:
“One of my first orders of business after getting elected was to have my transition team amass an exhaustive list of all the constitutional, statutory, and customary powers of the governor,” he writes in The Courage to Be Free. “I wanted to be sure that I was using every lever available to advance our priorities.” Aides from the time have corroborated this account, describing a thick binder of information that DeSantis proceeded to devour.
There’s no need to reiterate all the ways in which he uses every lever and coerces the legislature to enact the most extreme agenda of any state in America and now promises to take it national. Should he win he will run with the Schedule F plan and probably come up with a few of his own. This is what defines him as a political leader.
In fact, from the sound of all the Republicans on the trail extolling the alleged “bombshell” that’s actually a dud of the Durham Report as if it’s some huge indictment of the “deep state” that has to be completely dismantled, it’s obvious that this is going to be a Republican Party project, not a Trump project at all. They are all organizing themselves around blatant lies about elections, democracy, law and justice, health, foreign policy and national security and their partisan institutions are plotting to use those lies to remake the federal government.
It’s an ambitious plan but with the courts on their side and a congressional majority, it’s eminently doable. It’s imperative that the American people do not let them attain power again as long as this is their agenda or there may be no going back.
Look at the garbage he spreads on Truth Social:
Uh huh. Here’s another caucasian family posing in their mansion:
If you want to understand what Trump might be charged with I recommend reading Just Security’s possible prosecution memo. We don’t know at this moment what Trump might be facing but we do know that he’s facing indictment in the January 6th case now that he’s received a target letter.
This tweet thread from Norm Eisen, one of the authors, offers a succinct summary:
The memo is unique bc ours is the first in-depth application of the relevant criminal law to the facts, building on the more concise criminal referrals the committee offered in its report
We look at that report w/ skeptical eyes as prosecutors do
We narrow the case to what can confidently be proven to a jury, and for the first time anywhere we consider at length, and of course in good faith, Trump’s defenses and how they will fare
We can do that because of our all-star coauthors @NoahBookbinder, @DonaldAyer6, @StantonLaw, @EDanyaPerry, @DebraPerlin and Kayvan Farchadi, and our amazing editor @RGoodlaw. (4/x)
Moreover, we can now assess prosecution because the public record has grown a great deal since the Select Committee report’s publication in December 2022, and we update it with the information released after the report
We consider the depositions & documents that the Committee itself released after the report came out, as well as a substantial amount of other reported new evidence
& as @JRubinBlogger noted in her write-up: the key is simplicity!
OK now for those three (relatively) simple acts
ACT ONE. Trump knew he lost the election but did not want to give up power, so he worked with his lawyers and others on a wide variety of schemes to change the outcome.
Those schemes included creating fraudulent electoral certificates that were submitted to Congress, implicating statutes such as 18 U.S.C. § 371, which prohibits conspiracies to defraud the United States in the administration of elections
ACT TWO. When all the other schemes failed, Trump and his lawyers ultimately concentrated on using the false electoral slates to obstruct the constitutionally mandated congressional certification of the election on January 6
This implicates 18 U.S.C. § 1512, which prohibits obstruction of an official proceeding
Their primary goal: have VP Pence in his presiding role either block Congress from recognizing Joe Biden’s win at all–or at least delay the electoral count
ACT THREE. When Pence refused, Trump went to his last resort: triggering an insurrection in the hope that it would throw Congress off course, delaying the transfer of power for the first time in American history
This implicates statutes such as 18 U.S.C. § 2383, which prohibits inciting an insurrection and giving aid or comfort to insurrectionists
Prosecutors rarely charge § 2383. As we discuss below, they only do so with extreme caution
We believe there is sufficient evidence to pursue it—as did the Select Committee in making a criminal referral of Trump under that statute—but prosecutors may make different choices. Much will depend on the evidence the Special Counsel develops.
Throughout this memo, we urge a FOCUSED approach to charging and trying the case that can be done using our three-part structure or another simplifying approach that would allow the case to come to trial within a year
Now let’s dig into each of those three offenses
First is 18 USC § 371, conspiracy to defraud the US
This statute has two different “prongs,” and Trump likely violated both of them
Trump likely violated both the “offense prong” & the “defraud prong”
This means he likely agreed to 1) do something illegal & 2) do something to prohibit a lawful govt function
Submitting false electoral slates likely constitutes the crime of making a false statement to Congress & interfering with the count of of genuine electoral ballots disrupts a lawful govt function Trump drove both, ergo his potential liability under 18 U.S.C. 371
By the way, it doesn’t matter if the object of the conspiracy is completed or not–a defendant can still be convicted just for attempt
Trump could also be charged for attempting to obstruct counting of electors via § 1512(c)(2)
The law doesn’t require proof of conscious wrongdoing–but Trump & collaborators likely knew their conduct was wrong anyways
Trump seemingly knew he lost election & court battles
Counting the electoral votes is an official proceeding–and what counts as impeding one is “expansive,” according to at least one federal judge
When Trump pressured Pence to reject electors, and unleashed a mob on the proceedings, he apparently impeded them
Trump also apparently gave aid to insurrection, which is a crime under 18 USC § 2383
Bipartisan majorities have called the attack on the Capitol an “insurrection”
Trump’s comments leading up to & on Jan 6 may have incited the insurrection
He told them “fight like hell” and “you’ll never take back our country with weakness”
His tweet at 2:24pm targeted the VP–followed by 187 minutes of inaction
Trump has offered many explanations, denials, and defenses over the last two years
We explain why these defenses will likely fail
Trump claims his Jan 6 speech is protected by the 1st Amendment–it’s not
His speech passes the Brandenburg test, which says that provoking imminent lawless action is not protected speech
By his supporters’ own words, Trump’s speech encouraged them to storm the Capitol
Here’s one of the unique things we do in the report:
We did a deep dive into all Trump’s defenses, factually and legally
Trump will surely argue (as he has elsewhere) that he has immunity from criminal prosecution for acts he took as president
But that immunity does not apply to criminal acts taken well outside the scope of the presidency like trying to overthrow an election
Trump has also raised an advice of counsel defense
For as many attorneys like Giuliani and Eastman who told him “yes,” many told him “no”
Either way, Trump likely believed in his false election claims long before any attorney convinced him they were true
In any false statements case, like this one, the prosecution has to prove that the false statements were made in bad faith
So, Trump will certainly argue that is not the case
HOWEVER, this defense is likely FACTUALLY & LEGALLY unsustainable
There is ample evidence that Giuliani, Eastman, and the main perpetrators of the fake electors scheme KNEW it was unlawful
We know this because they said as much behind closed doors
Lastly, Trump and some of his allies claimed that he authorized 10k Nat’l Guard troops for Jan 6 which were rejected by the Mayor of DC
This is likely false based on all available evidence from military leaders’ testimony
So, as you can see, there is a path to prosecuting Trump, and we think that is coming
It’s coming.
It’s only July
Friends got stuck on the tarmac at O’Hare Airport for three hours last Wednesday as rare tornadoes ripped through the Chicago area. (Local newscasters call it Chicagoland, but that just sounds to me like an amusement park.) There was another tornado warning on Friday evening.
The heat is doing more than melt glaciers (Washington Post):
As the Northern Hemisphere approaches summer’s peak, heat is testing the limits of human survival in Earth’s hottest spots — and demonstrating the extremes that are increasingly possible and probable against the backdrop of accelerating global warming.
In recent days, China set an all-time high of nearly 126 degrees Fahrenheit, while Death Valley hit 128 degrees, two shy of the highest reliably measured temperature on Earth. Phoenix was expected to observe a record-breaking 19th consecutive day at or above 110 degrees Tuesday. And in the Middle East, the heat index reached 152 degrees, nearing — or surpassing — levels thought to be the most intense the human body can withstand.
Such conditions are more than enough to overwhelm the body’s ability to regulate its internal temperature, experts said, and offer a glimpse of dangers only expected to become more prevalent as global warming increases extremes in heat and humidity.
A friend from India used to talk about it getting so hot that birds overwhelmed by it fell out of trees. Something to look forward to since we seem unwilling to do enough to stop climate change.