https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/08/04/charges_against_trump_hinge_on_what_he_believed_and_when_149584.html Charges Against Trump Hinge on What He Believed and When Philip Wegmann - RCP StaffAugust 04, 2023 AP In a federal courthouse that rioters marched past on their way to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, former President Donald Trump pled not guilty to four felony charges that he had attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. “When you look at what is happening,” he later told reporters, who had waited for him in the rain on the tarmac of Reagan International Airport, “this is a persecution of a political opponent. This was never supposed to happen in America.” Trump then boarded his plane without taking questions. Yet, many questions stemming from special prosecutor Jack Smith’s indictment will remain, and the competing, confusing legal arguments about whether the previous president knowingly lied about whether fraud swayed the last election will likely determine the immediate future of the nation. The defense retorts that those charges amount to “criminalizing speech.” Under the obstruction statute brought by Smith, the government must prove that Trump knew that the 2020 election was fair and that he had corrupt intent when launching a conspiracy to overturn it. Hours after the indictment was released, Trump attorney John Lauro that he’d “like them to try to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Donald Trump believed that these allegations were false.” The indictment lists Trump’s claims that there was widespread fraud, and the indictment details how members of his circle, from former Vice President Mike Pence and then-Attorney General William Barr to his own campaign officials, rebutted them in the moment. Not included in the 45-page document? A smoking gun, according to Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law professor emeritus. “They seem to have lots of people who are prepared to testify – who will testify – that Donald Trump actually believed that the election was stolen. He was wrong. He was dead wrong. But the Supreme Court of the United States has held repeatedly that there's no such thing as a false opinion under the First Amendment,” Dershowitz told the Hill Rising. “If he had the opinion that he had won the election, then the corruption allegations can't stand,” the professor continued
I agree… better start building more resort prisons: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-un...sident-fraud-c076a2ee?mod=opinion_featst_pos1 If lying politicians can be prosecuted for ‘fraud,’ as he proposes in the Trump indictment, we’ll need a lot of new prisons. Kimberley A. Strassel Wonder Land: At the center of the legal problems now engulfing Donald Trump and Hunter Biden is the refrain that no one is above the law. That’s the biggest problem with Mr. Smith’s latest broadside against Donald Trump, on top of its untested legal theories and evidence of a Justice Department double standard. As former Attorney General William Barr told CNN on Wednesday, “there were reasons not to bring” the case, and among them is “the slippery slope of criminalizing legitimate political activity.” Take Mr. Trump out of the equation and consider more broadly what even the New York Times calls Mr. Smith’s “novel approach.” A politician can lie to the public, Mr. Smith concedes. Yet if that politician is advised by others that his comments are untruthful and nonetheless uses them to justify acts that undermine government “function,” he is guilty of a conspiracy to defraud the country. Dishonest politicians who act on dubious legal claims? There aren’t enough prisons to hold them all. Consider how many politicians might already be doing time had prosecutors applied this standard earlier. Both Al Goreand George W. Bush filed lawsuits in the 2000 election that contained bold if untested legal claims. Surely both candidates had advisers who told them privately that they may have legitimately lost—and neither publicly conceded an inch until the Supreme Court resolved the matter. Might an ultimate sore winner have used this approach to indict the loser for attempting to thwart the election. And why limit the theory to election claims? In 2014 the justices held unanimously that President Barack Obama had violated the Constitution by decreeing that the Senate was in recess so that he could install several appointees without confirmation. It was an outrageous move, one that Mr. Obama’s legal counselors certainly warned was a loser, yet the White House vocally insisted the president had total “constitutional authority” to do it. Under Mr. Smith’s standard, that was a lie that Mr. Obama used to defraud the public by jerry-rigging the function of a labor board with illegal appointments. What’s the betting someone told President Biden he didn’t have the power to erase $430 billion in student loan debt. Oh, wait! That’s right. He told himself. “I don’t think I have the authority to do it by signing with a pen,” he said in 2021. The House speaker advised him it was illegal: “People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not,” Nancy Pelosi said. Yet Mr. Biden later adopted the lie that he did, and took action to defraud taxpayers by obstructing the federal function of loan processing—until the Supreme Court made him stop. If even a former president can be hit with conspiracy charges, what’s to protect a mere congressman, or a failed candidate, or a consultant? For how long did Stacey Abrams falsely dispute her loss in the 2018 Georgia governor’s race and pressure Georgia lawmakers to alter election procedures in ways that might undermine voting integrity on the basis of untruths? Would the advisers who egged her on in that pursuit qualify as co-conspirators, like the lawyers in Mr. Smith’s indictment? The press is rooting for the special counsel to go after Republican lawmakers who on the basis of Mr. Trump’s claims objected to slates of electors on Jan. 6, 2021. Let’s line them all up, including dozens of Democrats who objected to slates in 2001, 2005 and 2017—on the basis of lies and with the purpose of conspiring to obstruct (as the Smith indictment puts it) “the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified.” We now know that Rep. Adam Schiff looked at a classified surveillance warrant application against a Trump adviser, lied about its contents publicly, memorialized those lies in an official memo, and used it to help gin up an investigation that definitely impeded the function of the Trump administration. We have evidence that the Federal Bureau of Investigation officials behind that application—James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok—used a dossier full of lies to get that warrant. Fortunately for them, special counsel John Durham chose not to take a flyer by indicting them for conspiracy. Smith fans will say this is a special case, the “big” lie, a one-time necessity for justice. Yet once a bar is lowered, it will be lowered further. Remember when impeachments, special committees, the stripping of committee assignments, and contempt citations were rare? Of course future prosecutors will take this precedent and expand it in ever more novel ways. There are any number of things as certain as death and taxes. One is that politicians will lie, and act on those untruths. Now that might make them felons.
