Thus putting to rest forever the myth no man is above the law.
FBI Search and Seizure at Trump's Mar-A-Lago Residence, August 8, 2022, Case Dismissed July 15, 2024
Agreed, unless he drops dead before trial. Of course then the MAGAs would assume he’d been most foully murdered by [insert current hate object here] and at least some of them would get off their couches and wreak some sort of havoc.
Oh, it’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card. It only means he’ll be held in a treatment facility and treated until it’s determined he’s restored to competency. Once that happens, back into the legal proceedings he goes.
If he’s restored. Is that likely, given his age, evident lifelong pathology, and degenerating cognitive ability?
Well, we’re getting ahead of ourselves, but is there really a downside to him being in an involuntary treatment facility with very limited contact with the outside world? It’s not much better than prison. Although no doubt accommodations would be made for him and his Secret Service detail – as they would be if he were housed in a prison.
Restoration to competency can take days, weeks, months or years. I don’t really care if he dies in a prison or a treatment facility. I just want him to stop destroying the country.
Amen to that, and the more I think of it, the more attractive an option I think having him declared incompetent might be.
ETA: Although, considering how hard it can be to get Gramps to give up the keys to his car, how much harder would it be to get Trump committed?
In that case, the Supreme Court gave a very strict interpretation to a federal anti-corruption law that had some ambiguities, and if I recall correctly, hadn’t had many cases.
The espionage act provisions in issue here strike me as lot simpler and have had a lot of prior cases. The Supreme Court would have to be willing to give a very narrow interpretation to a statute designed to protect national security.
Yabbut we’ve seen how much respect for well-settled precedent this court has shown.
When he’s being interviewed on TV, whether in his CNN Town Hall or the Fox interview he did just recently, he reminds me of nothing as much as Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny. I halfway expect him to reach into his pocket for a set of steel balls, and start yammering about strawberries, rather than directly answering the questions that are being asked of him.
Steel, if we’re lucky.
It may be unlikely in his case, but beware of the “Ernest Saunders” defence
It occurs to me that we’ve talked in the past about how you’d never see Trump on the stand, because no lawyer is going to want him incriminating himself in court.
But, as someone who is a candidate for the next presidential election, and a prospective nominee for the Republican Party, he needs to be visible. Also, as a narcissist, he’s going to have the urge to tell his side of the story to the public, especially if people are asking. And they are, of course they will be.
So, he might as well be spilling his guts on the witness stand, because all of this stuff he is saying on the record, on tape, in public, in front of the television-viewing audience, that’s all out there. You can’t put that cat back in the box.
What is he going to do, go hide in a hotel room with his mouth shut through the primaries and then the election?
I think he really painted himself into a corner here.
You’re leaving out a step.
witness stand > psychiatric eval > loony bin> wins nomination, election>declares self sane, judge and prosecutor jailed for life
And of course: > PROFIT!
How exactly would you ban him from social media, if he’s not in jail? I mean, seriously, do you really believe he’d just go along with this?
The only thing that would keep him off social media is the threat of jail, and if you didn’t jail him over the classified documents, do you think he’d believe the threat to jail him over using Twitter?
The only way Trump leaves social media is if he’s stuck somewhere where he physically isn’t allowed to use his phone, and that means jail.
Take away his SIM card and blacklist Truth Social’s IP on his WiFi router.
He famously borrowed cell phones from anybody and everybody around him.
I don’t think house arrest precludes scouring the room for electronic devices, and arresting anyone who tries to smuggle one in for him.
If his clams of being a victim, by some chance as this, turn out to be true, watch him also win in November 2024.
Of course, I am not worried about this silly disaster coming true. A few thousand Democrats, on the internet, may want to block him from running or campaigning, but Bragg, Smith, Cannon, and whomever will run the Georgia case, would not entertain it.
Even in regular federal prison, there is an email-type system that would allow Trump to run for office, spending all day communicating with his campaign staff, and telling them exactly what to Truth and Tweet on his behalf:
I don’t get the fascination with giving house arrest, when the sentencing guideline says prison, and them dreaming up ways to worsen it.
EDIT/CORRECTION: Federal prisoners can’t literally spend all day communicating with the outside, but it seems they can spend about two thirds of the time on it: