Glenn Kirschner explain a kind of conspiracy that might have a shot.
Can you elaborate a bit? Just posting a link with no additional commentary or explanation isn’t a good starting point for a thread.
Not everyone has bandwidth sufficient to view youtube videos. Including me. Further elaboration would be useful.
Thanks.
His presentation has a nice chart with orange guy at the center, and all the various activities spoking out- Jr, the fraudulent lawsuits by Giuliani et al, Stone, Bannon, and the Congressional aid & comforters. And more.
I watched it, wondering what a hub-and-spoke conspiracy is. Kirschner starts off with a bit of conspiracy theory. First, “3 guys decide to rob a bank.” Then the trusty Mafia style pyramid conspiracy. And finally the hub-and-spoke model. As I have little interest in the conspiracy in question many of the cast of conspirators, and their roles, are unfamiliar to me.
I watched most of the video. I don’t really see how shoehorning the trump conspiracy players into a ‘hub and spoke’ model really helps anything, either in terms of understanding the conspiracy or in a model to assist prosecution.
In general terms, I can see how if you’re a criminal mastermind, a ‘hub and spoke’ model can be beneficial. Since the ‘spokes’ don’t interact, or may not even know each other, if one of the spokes is indicted it can’t bring down the other spokes by implicating them or sharing knowledge of what they are up to. In that sense it’s like the way terrorist cells work.
But the supposed ‘spokes’ that Kirschner names all did know each other, or at least knew of each other, and in many cases did work together. It seems to me that trump’s conspiracy club was more of an old-fashioned mafia-style pyramid than a ‘hub and spoke’ model.
Of course, most of them knew each other. But knowing each other is not necessary if they all are in on it. I think one of the features is that they don’t have to be coordinated with each other, just all working toward the same criminal goal.
Yeah, the players in the different ‘spokes’ that Kirschner outlines may not have been too closely coordinated with each other, but I think that’s more due to the sloppy, unorganized nature of the conspiracy, not due to anybody intentionally setting up a ‘hub and spoke’ style conspiracy in order to protect trump and give him and the individual spokes more plausible deniability.
It still seems to me more like a loosely coordinated mafia-style pyramid than hub-and-spoke.
I think of it as a pustule, with infection spreading. If enough pressure is brought to bear, maybe it can be popped.
Both the pyramid and the hub and spoke models suggest some thought going into organizing the conspiracy. None of that is evident in the Trump conspiracy. So I’m thinking the steaming pile of shit org chart, but Son_of_a-Rich’s pustule model works too.
The model of con artists (from my read of The Big Con) is effectively that the cons know who the other cons are and, when one of them needs to put together a set piece - a fake bank, a gambling shop, a party, etc. they call everyone in town, ask them to help out, and give them a cut of the action.
A pyramid has a top-down component. This is more just a gentleman’s agreement among grifters to let the guy who put the fish on the hook to lead that particular outing and take the biggest cut but, otherwise, it’s simply a group feeding. And on any particular day, for any particular job, the ring leader might be a different fellow.
As President and former President, I’m sure that Trump got to call the shots far more frequently than in historical times but I would expect that he’s still showing up for others’ takes, to play the role that they need him to play for their score.