We do have to be careful about keeping those civil-liberties safeguards in place when flinging around criminal indictments. However, as a Democrat I don’t have a problem with the prospect of Democratic (and other) elected officials having a little extra incentive to make sure that they’re phrasing their speeches carefully to say what they mean.
If you as an elected official can’t express your support for a peaceful demonstration, by BLM or any other lawful cause, without accidentally conveying a strong suggestion that you want the demonstrators to resort to illegal violence, then you sure as fuck need some better speechwriters.
Agreed. It’s not that Biden should be personally making decisions about prosecutions, nor that he should be instructing the AG to pursue charges.
He should be telling his AG to carry out the normal investigations when there is apparent evidence, to lay charges if warranted, to not lay charges if they’re not warranted, and that Biden will back up the AG’s decisions, whichever they go.
He is often derided for not being the sharpest tack in the box, but one thing Trump is the master of, is getting close to the line without actually going over it. If you listen to his remarks in Washington on January 6, he never actually told his supporters to storm and occupy the Capitol. Instead, he hinted that Mike Pence has some sort of powers he has under some super-secret constitutional provision, and Pence needs to do the right thing. Only if he does, will you be happy. The corollary is, that if Pence does not do what Trump wants, you won’t be happy, will you?
Later, he pinwheels to “Biden should not be in there” because “we’re not going to stand for that”:
Much later, he returns to what he believes is Pence’s role, his belief that Biden is illegitimate, and that the people in the crowd that he’s addressing cannot let that happen:
And finally, we’re going to the Capitol, to do something for Republicans in Congress, by walking down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. What that “something” is, is not stated:
There are so many examples in his Wednesday rally speech (which lasted 73 minutes–who does he think he is, Fidel Castro?), but it is easy to see that while Trump doesn’t overtly encourage breaking into and occupying the Capitol, he implies it; and some of his more rabid supporters in the crowd would (and as history tells us, did) interpret his remarks as a call to do just that. He knew damn well what he was inciting with his remarks, but he stopped shy of stating such, and let his followers draw their own conclusions about what he wanted them to do. Which they did.
There is one thing, and one thing only, that Trump is good at it. Being a con man without leaving any evidence of his crimes. And he is a fucking mastermind at it, probably the best in the country’s history, and he has been doing it his entire life. He is not nor ever has been a politcal genius playing 3 dimensional chess. So for my pop cultural refernce of the day, I give you this. I was just joking with a friend on Facebook, I can come up with one for just about anything.
I think that it would not just be his speech on Wednesday, but his entire pattern of behaviour since the election, leading up to that speech. It’s the totality of the events. I think a well-argued prosecution case could meet that standard of a “reasonable likelihood of conviction”, and then it’s in the hands of the jury, which is exactly where it should be.
Right. Something about how he continued to say the election was stolen without providing a single piece of evidence, and he did so in front of an angry crowd, many of whom were known to him to be seditionists, and what was the likely outcome? Something similar to a manslaugher charge.
To you and me and most people in this thread, he is guilty as hell. Will a jury buy it, if it ever comes to one, ,which I doubt
But there was evidence! My brother’s girlfriend’s cousin’s sister’s friend was a Republican observer, and she said that Democrat observers kept her six feet away from the counting. I swore an affidavit attesting to such. The court threw my evidence out. Fraud! Corrupt courts!
[Sarcasm: Off]
No, you idiot. That’s hearsay, not evidence that is admissible in court. And at such a distance from the parties to any lawsuit, you have no standing. Suck it up, buttercup.
Regarding the argument from the insurrectionists that it’s logically impossible to break in if it’s a public building:
One could say the same thing about the police. They are public servants, their salaries and buildings and uniforms and everything else are paid via public funds.
So I can just mosey on down to the motor pool and drive myself away in a squad car, right?
Of course, and the same applies to publicly-funded military bases and weapons installations. Drop in and pick up a nuke or two any time you like, it’s your God-given right as a 'Murican.
