If it can be proven that they were in the conspiracy with the fake electors, and the reason for delaying was to facilitate that criminal enterprise - then yes, it’s illegal as part of that conspiracy.
If my part in a conspiracy to murder you is to keep you chatting for 15 minutes while my co-conspirator gets the gun, then the chatting is part of the murderous conspiracy.
I think a better analogy might be, chatting with the manager of a store is of course perfectly legal and normal behavior. When you do it to distract the manager so that an accomplice can steal things while the manager is distracted, then you’re committing a crime. That’s why we have “conspiracy” as a crime; it can involve seemingly legal things that would appear innocent until tied into a conspiracy to commit a crime.
Proving it might be more difficult than proving a murder where someone saw you shoot someone, but it seems like prosecutors have a lot of evidence.
There’s been a handful of cases where a getaway driver, who sat in their car the entire time, gets charged with murder when the person robbing the store kills someone.
And as I was looking for a cite for the one I was thinking of, I found a whole lot more of them, apparently it’s not a ‘handful of cases’ it’s quite a lot more than I realized.
An Omaha man accused of being the getaway driver in a fatal shooting Wednesday night has been charged with first-degree murder and ordered to be held without bail.
The getaway driver in a 2020 homicide in Buffalo was sentenced to 13 years in prison for his role, the Erie County District Attorney’s Office announced Monday.
The getaway driver and first of three co-defendants to be tried in the July 2021 slaying of Clark County sheriff’s Sgt. Jeremy Brown was found guilty Thursday of felony murder.
Elvis Feratovic, 24, of Bloomfield is charged with felony murder and robbery. He is accused of being in the car while two others went to the store, robbed and shot 47-year-old Xavier Egoavil to death.
I adore the Illustrated Guide to Law. It’s a webcomic created by Nathan Burney, a former ADA from New York who now teaches law (both online and at the University of Alabama).
He discusses conspiracy on his site, and his example is a classic heist story which starts here:
It goes bad and in the course of the crime, a security guard shooting at the criminals accidentally hits a baby in a stroller, killing the baby.
This page gets into accomplice liability:
And this page gets into “felony murder”, where potentially the others involved in the crime who weren’t directly involved with the shooting (or even physically there) could still potentially be charged:
It’s entertaining, informative, and easy to read. That site has really helped me, a layperson with the tiniest amount of formal legal training (just one business law class in college many years ago) to understand a lot of legal procedures. The conspiracy part that I linked to initially is helpful to understand how some of the people in this case can be charged when it seems like they didn’t have much to do with directly causing the election fraud to occur.
How about conspiracy to defraud the United States? It’s one of the things Trump is charged with.
The general purpose of this part of the statute is to protect governmental functions from frustration and distortion through deceptive practices. Section 371 reaches “any conspiracy for the purpose of impairing, obstructing or defeating the lawful function of any department of Government.” Tanner v. United States , 483 U.S. 107, 128 (1987); see Dennis v. United States , 384 U.S. 855 (1966).
https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual-923-18-usc-371-conspiracy-defraud-us
Team Trump’s latest defense strategy seem to be
Federal government bias (Everybody hates me and they are poopyheads)
Foreign interference (a bigger boy made me do it, sir)
Disinformation (I believed my own election bullshit, and ignored my advisors)
That…that I would 100% believe. I honestly think he’s actually stupid enough to believe his own bullshit. I don’t think it’s at all a stretch to assume he spews out so much crap that, when he hears it again, he forgets that he’s the one that started it.
Well, that seems like another reason why he shouldn’t be president. Also, since that defense seems to rely on Russia interfering…
Prosecutors “cannot blame President Trump for public discord and distrust of the 2020 election results while refusing to turn over evidence that foreign actors stoked the very same flames,” his lawyers wrote in court in late November.
…would that not open him up to other issues? I get that he’s just trying to delay things, but ISTM admitting that Russia interfered…wait…
Is he saying that Russia interfered to give Biden the advantage?
Okay, so how does that work? The White House turns over any evidence of Russia’s involvement in the 2020 election and to no one’s surprise, it all points directly at Trump and then what? Is he really still hoping to get this flipped on the “I cheated and they still won so they must have cheated even more” platform?
I have to assume every time he runs his mouth, more and more people are telling him to STFU and stop digging himself in deeper.
Wait for the shit show that’s going to happen as soon as the Epstein documents are unsealed. He’s going to have to deal with fallout from that as well.
And, of course, he publicly asked them to interfere, and his son, in an effort to prove that he didn’t take part in that interference, published all of the emails in which he took part in the interference.
I don’t think so, I suspect it’s the conspiracy theory that China interfered with the election, since supposedly Joe is in bed with them through Hunter’s company. Remember the crazy talk about bamboo fibers on ballots?
This is my guess.
Naw, everyone will focus on Bill Clinton (and any other prominent Democrat/liberal) and Trump will skate away.
Partly because his people won’t believe it and liberals expect it. It’ll be a “Yeah, he’s a sleaze. So?”
Right, I forgot all about that. However, the article does go on to say:
One of the foreign actions they’ve pointed to came from Russia’s foreign intelligence service and a hack of the SolarWinds software that compromised data at several federal agencies in December 2020. Trump’s legal team wrote that attack meant “there were reasonable concerns about the integrity of the election and the possibility of technical penetrations of election infrastructure.”
I’m surprised Trump’s team would point to anything showing Russia interfering in the US, even if it’s unrelated to the election, as some sort of alibi. Even he can’t be stupid enough to think that will end well for him. I mean, keep blaming Hunter’s laptop or China or even pick out a new country that hasn’t been dragged into this yet and blame them, but you’d think he’d want to keep everyone for putting more energy into poking around at his connections with Russia.
Is he smart enough to shut his mouth and let everyone focus on Clinton and/or all the other big names on the list? Can he go almost a year without one-upping everyone else? Can he make it until November without saying something like ‘Clinton was only invited out there X times, my name is on that list [a lot more than X] times’ or even outright incriminating himself and admitting to sleeping with underage girls?
It’s not like he hasn’t bragged about crimes, and specifically sexual abuse, in the past.
Personally, I hope it goes that way. I hope all the right wing media tries to do him a favor by downplaying his involvement with Epstein only for him to stick his foot in his mouth and admit it on TV.
That is completely my bad for assuming that Trump and/or his lawyers would make a claim that was either consistent with past statements or wasn’t totally self-sabotaging. I should know better.
Could that be <“Church Lady” voice> PUTIN? < /CLv>
God, it drives me nuts how they keep equivocating on this. Sure, if there are ‘legitimate’ concerns about such hacks of election infrastructure, it would fall under the president’s duties to investigate those concerns. But what part of investigating a hack of computers involves personally calling up the election officials in several states to badger them into “finding” more votes for you? What part of investigating this involves creating fraudulent slates of Electors?
‘Investigating’ the ‘fraud’ isn’t what he’s on trial for, it’s all the other shit he did.
I think going into 2020 he started the “fixed election” thing as he knew he was toast. Then, he started to believe his own con, something which usually spells the end of a con man.
Yes, and the appropriate way to investigate such concerns is to refer it to the DOJ. Which he did.
And then didn’t like the answer he got, so began “investigating” on his own. So in a way, “investigating” the fraud is what he’s going to trial for. But of course as you point out, he wasn’t “investigating” so much as criming to steal the election from President Biden.
He started that well before the 2020 election. I don’t remember if it was before the 2016 election or just way before the 2020 election, but IIRC he came right out and told the world he was going to do this.
But regarding my being surprised that he would purposely get Russia involved here, I guess that’s right on par with him being a sore winner in 2016. Who the fuck wins an election and then accuses the other person of cheating? Just take your W and keep your mouth shut.
Trump literally began his modern political career by denying elections with his birther shit.
Please, please. This is Donald J. Trump we’re talking about. He did it in advance of both ‘his’ elections (and the one four years before).
[Just the article as it may be a bit off-topic (?)]