I’m certain that he wasn’t DIRECTLY involved, and I am sure that he knew things were happening and looked the other way. They’re just some good ol’ boys, never meaning no harm.
In spite of being a county official, and counties being subsidiaries of the state, so their offices derive no legitimacy from the U.S. Constitution but from the law of each state under its reserved powers.
Again it’s that whole mythical “DA U-S-frickin’-A CONSTATOOSHON says we get to do things whatever the way we see fit, and da guvmint can do NUTHIN!” thing.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d had a few direct conversations with the sheriff about citizen’s arrests. The sheriff jumped to that excuse pretty quickly.
They didn’t have a lot of the police supporting them, either. White supremacists have made it a thing to infiltrate police forces across the country for the last 40 years. There’s at least one sheriff in Michigan who thinks if they were just trying to arrest the governor, it was legal.
They’re both correct. If they believed they witnessed the governor commit a felony, they would have the right to arrest her. At the same time, they shouldn’t be deciding that the governor committed a felony on some fringe basis of hearing news that she decreed something that for whatever reason they think is not constitutional, as such a disagreement is clearly not a felony, but a matter for the courts to administer appropriate corrective action. It is definitely dangerous to somewhat approve of their right to arrest her when it’s clear that it was not a felony personally witnessed, but that doesn’t make anything of what the sheriff said false - just a bad idea.
"“One of alleged plotters, 23-year-old Daniel Harris, attended a Black Lives Matter protest in June, telling the Oakland County Times he was upset about the killing of George Floyd and police violence.”
Huh? You are contradicting yourself here. What the sheriff said is absolutely false, since the circumstances did not remotely exist in which a citizen’s arrest is legal.
… and? There were countless reports of Boogaloo Boys and other right-wing extremists at those protests, they rant about police brutality all the time. It’s a “strange bedfellows” situation at best, not an indication that the plotters were secretly Antifa members. Try again.
Everything the sheriff said that can be assigned a truth value was literally true. The only nontrivial statements of fact were that “they say a ‘plot to kidnap’”, which is true, “…a lot of people are angry with the governor and they want her arrested” is true depending on what you mean by “a lot”, and “…you can still in Michigan if it’s a felony, make a felony arrest”, which is also true. The rest of his words are questions and innuendo that cannot be assigned a truth value. Now the overall takeaway from what people are going to think because of these words is certainly false, and the words were constructed to create that thought in people’s minds, but you can’t point at anything in particular that’s false in what he said. The only thing that’s wrong is the implication that these statements of fact should be connected together to imply that they had the right to arrest her. But he doesn’t actually say that, at least not in those words.
Yes, I’m being incredibly pedantic. The AG’s response did not contradict anything he said, but did say that his comments were dangerous, because they are. People will get the wrong impression from the comments as a whole, but that doesn’t make any of them individually wrong.
No, you’re not being pedantic, you’re simply wrong. Because context matters in communicating meaning, not just the literal meaning of each phrase taken in context-free isolation. In an interview about a plot to kidnap and murder a Governor, talking about the fact that a citizens’ arrest is sometimes a legal thing to do has the same “truth” value as talking about the possibility that if the Governor had been abducted by aliens then setting off in an armed posse to rescue her would be a noble thing to do.