Breaking 1-06-21: MAGA terrorist attack on Capitol

Not guilty

 

I think

We can all agree

That she would be better served

With the lawyering

If she just ate

A banana

 

The WSJ keeps on raising "unprecedented specters" regarding the indictments of Trump yet forget that Trump is an unprecedented President. These were unprecedented because no other president did the things that Trump did and that Trump himself said he was going to be unlike any other President.

That is raises some future pall on the Presidency is simply a matter of future Presidents shouldn't try to overturn their elections and they want suffer from the precedences set by Trump.

 

For all of those sort of opining over the polls right now a year out:

Remember that candidates would not spend billions on campaign ads if they did not work. Right now people are only hearing about the indictments through their own propaganda filters. When skilled political campaign people armed with a billion dollars have a chance to message all of this (and much more to come) in political ads that will be impossible for independent voters to avoid, I do think this will end up being highly unhelpful for Trump... to say the least.

........

I also do not think the polls are accurate at all. Especially right now. Obviously the Trump campaign strategists side with me too on that notion since they are trying so hard to get 3rd party spoilers in the race since they know that's the only hope they have, and have shown no intention of running on issues the middle cares about.

 

But to caveat my prior post, I definitely think Trump will be the nominee, and yes there is still a chance he wins. Biden would need some serious Hillary like electoral depressant though and a serious third party spoiler is needed. Trump is unlikely to win, and if he doesn't win he'll spend the rest of his life in prison. However there's still a chance he pulls a rabbit out of his hat, wins by a narrow margin, pardons himself essentially, and we are pretty much looking at being a sham democracy on day 1 of him being sworn in.

If you haven't already, go check your voter registration card.

 

Quite a bit can change the landscape in a year, I dont think anyone on the left will change their minds, maga folks will not change, I think there will be a small fraction of repugs who will not vote for trump because of this so you have the independents to deal with. I can only hope that enough voters think for themselves, if trump is allowed back in the WH I am not sure we would recover for quite awhile, even worse if the repugs control the house and senate.............the public has a year to decipher everything, and I hope the American people make the right choice. My silver lining is that trump did not win the last election and there was a reason for that, and trump has only gotten worse, it would be bizzaro world if he won but trump is by definition of bizzaro world on steroids

 

Trump is a traitor and should suffer a traitors fate.

Pray with me, Dear God, please smite Trump and Putin - the world needs it.

DD

 

Brigitte Gabriel founded an anti-muslim hate group. I can see why she's a Trump supporter.

 

Not guilty

that’s one way to get a hung jury

 

Ignorance of the law is not an excuse...try harder Traitor Trump.

DD

 

folks seem to be focusing on Trump's defenses/excuses, but the important thing is the burden of proof on the prosecution to prove what they are asserting about Trump's intent and state of mind. That's not going to be an easy task.

 

Probably not as hard as you think when the man won't shut up.

 

This may be indictment 1 of 2 in August alone. Georgia is next.

 

Do the people who write this crap even believe it? A coup attempt is outside the presidents official responsibility. Bloviating for 500 words doesn't negate the flat out stupidity of this argument.

 

Barr got off easy, he is most likely referring to the numerous Trump associates who end up broke and / or in prison.

 

The case will be decided during voir dire and jury selection. Unless the prosecution doesn’t have the evidence to support the indictment, I don’t think the prosecution will have a tough time proving the case unless there is a trumper on the jury.

 

I do think most likely Biden will win. Biden isn’t popular because he’s old, says dumb stuff and can be creepy. Head to head though with Trump and probably even DeSantis I don’t think he comes off as bad.

The last two elections have shown that most Independents don’t like MAGA. Candidates in swing states they closely identified with Trump and ran on culture war issues were beaten. Katie Hobbs in Az refused to publicly be seen with Kari Lake, a very risky strategy, but still won. The Republicans barely won the House and if NY had gerrymandered likely wouldn’t have.

At the moment I’m not seeing the GOP really doing anything to change.

 

The burden of proof is always on the prosecution in our system. In a case like this though where there is a preponderance of evidence on the prosecution side The defense though does have to present a credible argument for reasonable doubt.

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-un...ent-fraud-c076a2ee?mod=hp_opin_pos_2#cxrecs_s

The Unprecedented Jack Smith
If lying politicians can be prosecuted for ‘fraud,’ as he proposes in the Trump indictment, we’ll need a lot of new prisons.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Aug. 3, 2023 at 6:32 pm ET

If there’s one word to describe what everyone might wish Washington would stop producing, it’s “unprecedented.” Yet here we go again, with special counsel Jack Smith’s unprecedented indictment of a politician for engaging in “a conspiracy to defraud the United States.” Be prepared for this new and startlingly elastic precedent to ensnare plenty of others.

That’s the biggest problem with Mr. Smith’s latest broadside against Donald Trump, on top of its untested legal theories and evidence of a Justice Department double standard. As former Attorney General William Barr told CNN on Wednesday, “there were reasons not to bring” the case, and among them is “the slippery slope of criminalizing legitimate political activity.”

Take Mr. Trump out of the equation and consider more broadly what even the New York Times calls Mr. Smith’s “novel approach.” A politician can lie to the public, Mr. Smith concedes. Yet if that politician is advised by others that his comments are untruthful and nonetheless uses them to justify acts that undermine government “function,” he is guilty of a conspiracy to defraud the country. Dishonest politicians who act on dubious legal claims? There aren’t enough prisons to hold them all.

Consider how many politicians might already be doing time had prosecutors applied this standard earlier. Both Al Gore and George W. Bush filed lawsuits in the 2000 election that contained bold if untested legal claims. Surely both candidates had advisers who told them privately that they may have legitimately lost—and neither publicly conceded an inch until the Supreme Court resolved the matter. Might an ultimate sore winner have used this approach to indict the loser for attempting to thwart the democratic process?

And why limit the theory to election claims? In 2014 the justices held unanimously that President Barack Obama had violated the Constitution by decreeing that the Senate was in recess so that he could install several appointees without confirmation. It was an outrageous move, one that Mr. Obama’s legal counselors certainly warned was a loser, yet the White House vocally insisted the president had total “constitutional authority” to do it. Under Mr. Smith’s standard, that was a lie that Mr. Obama used to defraud the public by jerry-rigging the function of a labor board with illegal appointments.

What’s the betting someone told President Biden he didn’t have the power to erase $430 billion in student loan debt. Oh, wait! That’s right. He told himself. “I don’t think I have the authority to do it by signing with a pen,” he said in 2021. The House speaker advised him it was illegal: “People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not,” Nancy Pelosisaid. Yet Mr. Biden later adopted the lie that he did, and took action to defraud taxpayers by obstructing the federal function of loan processing—until the Supreme Court made him stop.

If even a former president can be hit with conspiracy charges, what’s to protect a mere congressman, or a failed candidate, or a consultant? For how long did Stacey Abrams falsely dispute her loss in the 2018 Georgia governor’s race and pressure Georgia lawmakers to alter election procedures in ways that might undermine voting integrity on the basis of untruths? Would the advisers who egged her on in that pursuit qualify as co-conspirators, like the lawyers in Mr. Smith’s indictment?

The press is rooting for the special counsel to go after Republican lawmakers who on the basis of Mr. Trump’s claims objected to slates of electors on Jan. 6, 2021. Let’s line them all up, including dozens of Democrats who objected to slates in 2001, 2005 and 2017—on the basis of lies and with the purpose of conspiring to obstruct (as the Smith indictment puts it) “the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified.”

We now know that Rep. Adam Schiff looked at a classified surveillance warrant application against a Trump adviser, lied about its contents publicly, memorialized those lies in an official memo, and used it to help gin up an investigation that definitely impeded the function of the Trump administration. We have evidence that the Federal Bureau of Investigation officials behind that application—James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok—used a dossier full of lies to get that warrant. Fortunately for them, special counsel John Durhamchose not to take a flyer by indicting them for conspiracy.

Smith fans will say this is a special case, the “big” lie, a one-time necessity for justice. Yet once a bar is lowered, it will be lowered further. Remember when impeachments, special committees, the stripping of committee assignments, and contempt citations were rare? Of course future prosecutors will take this precedent and expand it in ever more novel ways.

There are any number of things as certain as death and taxes. One is that politicians will lie, and act on those untruths. Now that might make them felons.

Appeared in the August 4, 2023, print edition as 'The Unprecedented Jack Smith'.
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