Re: Indecision 2024
Posted: Mon Aug 07, 2023 2:56 pm
Yes I read the sodding thing, including an annotated version, and several commentaries, which is why it has taken several days to think about it. I'm also very aware of not being American or used to the strange legal system, where people are often charged with long lists of charges, most of which end up being dropped.dyqik wrote: Mon Aug 07, 2023 12:45 pm And certainly more than Ivan, who clearly hasn't even bothered to look at the indictments, public summaries of them or the case law around those statutes.
The conspiracy Trump is charged with is sending fake electors certificates to Congress. These consist of clear fraudulent statements signed on paper, purporting to be the results of official elections. The fraud charge is the sending of those statements. Trump conspired with others to have those documents written and sent.
Trump's knowledge of this scheme and its fraudulent nature is testified to by his attempts to pressure Mike Pence to accept these certificates as potentially genuine, thus discarding the genuine certificates, prior to Jan 6th. Pence will most likely testify. His prior involvement is likely also known from testimony from the co-conspirators listed in the indictment.
So it's a really very clear chain of evidence of what is a classic example of fraud in the more general sense. The "defrauding the United States" charge is used because of the target of the fraud.
But I have also read some commentaries, which I did not take to be right wing wrecking, where what appear to be decent lawyers are saying that the difficulty is that it lacks specificity in terms of how the actions amount to lawbreaking, and hence it will be argued over.
In trying to explain it to me, you are doing the same thing as the indictment itself, namely stating the actions which are alleged to be illegal, but without saying just how they are illegal. There are very long narrative of actions, and the ones you mention are the most blatant. But exactly how are they illegal? You'd hope they were illegal. So why haven't we got a clear statement of just how they are illegal. Because actually he was careful to avoid doing things that very clearly broke a specific law. The actual counts I cite below, now in full, are very broad. What we lack, it just isn't there anywhere, is a clear legal exposition as to how those actions amount to breaking the very broad laws cited. It stands in clear contrast to the documents case, where there are very specific charges and clear evidence directed at demonstrating the committing of very specific offences.
The first count, the law cited is just the conspiracy law. We are not actually told what law this is a conspiracy to break. Nearly all of the narrative of of actions set out in the indictment is directed to the first count.
Take those false certificates you mention. What actual law was broken in presenting these false certificates? It is a fraud "in a general sense". I can write some falsehoods on a piece of paper and sign it, and give it to someone. For that to be a fraud, rather the novel I'm publishing, you still need to say why I had a legal duty to sign accurate statements rather than publish a novel on the subject. It would have been a much clearer, more effective, indictment if there was a specific law that made it a fraud, because that doesn't give room for an argument. Without that, I suspect there will be very long arguments over this.
The second and third counts, the law cited is tampering with a witness. The fourth count is injuring someone's exercise of their constitutional rights. At least these are actual offences, rather than just "conspiracy" without saying what laws the conspirators conspired to break. For these counts, the indictment mostly just point back at sections of the earlier narrative. But precisely how this long litany of very dubious actions amounts to a legal breach of these rather broad laws is not set out. For all I know injuring someone's exercise of their constitutional rights is just what you charge someone who tried to rig a federal election with, but the commentaries I read did not suggest that. Rather they thought there would be a job to do making such a charge stick in relation to those actions.
I'm sure Mr Smith has done the best he can, and that's what worries me. This list of actions ought to be illegal, very illegal. And so it ought to be tried in court to test to make sure that it is. But what worries me is that if the best that can apparently be done is this rather broad list of charges, and very little in the way of specifics as to how the long list of terrible actions amounts to an offence, then they will be arguing over it for a long time.
Unfortunately Trump often seems to push at legal boundaries, doing terrible things, in a way that doesn't very clearly break laws. Fortunately he wasn't very careful for once in the document case, and very clearly broke some rather specific laws, and evidence survived. The result was that very specific indictment he'll find very difficult to wriggle out of. This one, I suspect there is a lot of wriggling to be done and it could go on for a very long time.
So the main point I'm making is to doubt this case will be over before the next inauguration. Beyond that, it loses importance to Trump. But maybe it remains important to stop him standing in 2028. And it's still important more generally to show that all this stuff actually is illegal. If he wins the election and the case is dropped, that will be sad. If he loses the election, loses the case, and pushes it to the supreme court, and his partisan judges throw it out, that will be very sad also.
