Trump Concedes, Kind of

DavidTC in reply to Dark Matter says:

You’re sorta looking at the wrong part of this as the important test. The speech doesn’t have tell people to do any lawless action. At all. It just has to be ‘directed’ at ‘inciting’ or ‘producing’ lawless action. If you give a speech that does not, at any point, say to do anything illegal, but you give the speech with the intent of causing people to do illegal things, you’ve hit that threshold. You can’t wink wink nudge nudge into legality. There’s no ‘black letter calling for illegal action’ requirement.

There’s been people charged with inciting riots who proposed _no actions at all_. They simply stood there and told an angry mob what they thought about a person, listing their crimes, while that person locked up in a courthouse, and the crowd was already talking about breaking in to string him up. You do not have to tell a mob to do anything illegal, you just have to say things you think will result in illegal actions. There’s a very low threshold on _that_ bit.

It’s the _other_ two requirements that generally stops speech from being incitement. ‘Imminent’ and ‘likely’.

Much worse, my expectation is Obama wasn’t inciting violence when he told his followers to bring guns to knife fights.

That’s because Obama’s speech fails the both imminent test and the likely test. (Also, weirdly, inciting a murder that doesn’t happen isn’t illegal anyway in DC, but, constitutionally, it could be, and maybe it was in whatever state he was in, so let’s pretend it is.)

Obama likelihood test: The idea that Obama’s speech to donors was likely to result said donors grabbing their guns and going to some pre-existing knife fight is…a bit silly.

Obama imminency test: The knife fight presumably wasn’t to happen there, and Obama didn’t then direct the listeners to the location of this knife fight. It also directed people to do things at an unspecified time in the future, hence not ‘imminent’.

The way that ‘imminent’ worked, even if, the very next day, Democrats started wandering around with guns and shooting Republicans while explicitly saying Obama specifically told them to do that…_he would still not be guilty_ of incitement. That is not imminent enough, ‘imminent’ is incredibly restrictive. It has to be something the speaker wants the listener to turn around and do right then. The mob basically has to be standing there tapping the baseball bats against their palms.

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And ‘violent things’ has nothing to do with this. There’s no requirement for violence at all. The question is ‘Did he incite lawless actions?’ not ‘Did he incite a riot?’

While ‘inciting a riot’ is indeed an explicit crime, and does require some level of violence, inciting any sort of crime, at any level, that then happens is called ‘being an accessory before the fact’, and in DC, they can be charged with the full crime itself

Under DC law, if I see someone holding an empty water bottle and they say ‘I don’t know where to throw this away’, and I say ‘It doesn’t matter if it all just piles up in street, the city is going to hell anyway’, and they throw it on the ground…they clearly have just littered, and also I have just littered. I can be charged with actual, real littering, because I incited them to do an imminent lawless action, aka, litter, and they did. (Note this isn’t conspiracy, however, because I took no overt action to further the crime.)

That said, what happened does legally qualify as a riot. But, while he could be charged with inciting one, he could also be charged with rioting itself, as the crime actually happened, and he’s an accessory before the fact.

His master plan seems to have been something like “find the legal votes to prove he won the election”. We might even be looking at dementia. Certainly my family’s lunatic had/has similar disagreements on the definition of reality.

Trump does not have dementia anywhere near enough to escape any sort of legal culpability.

And his master plan seemed to be ‘delay the EC counting until Giuliani can get evidence’. He literally was calling Congresspeople during this urging them to delay it too. He knew he didn’t have the votes, he wanted things _delayed_ until he could produce evidence to get people to change their votes.

The question is: How exactly did he think a crowd outside the building could delay things? What legal things did he think was going to happen? That voting had actually already started, so it’s not like Congresspeople would even walk past them.

It’s worth pointing that attempting to interfere with the working of Congress is illegal by itself. In fact, people have gotten charged with exactly that for protesting in such a way it was likely to delay votes.

Trump, of course, probably(?) has a right to ask Congress to vote in any manner. As does anyone. But…how do people outside the building impact people inside the building enough to alter how they vote?

We once against appear to be in the ‘Trump is too stupid to realize he’s breaking the law’ theory, but here’s the thing: The law does not actually require Trump to understand what he expects from his speech _is_ illegal. Just that he intended to do things that, even unbeknownst to him, are illegal.

I assert that: He (And Rudy) intended to influence the people he was talking to into disrupting Congress in some manner to slow down the process, and we have as evidence that he was trying to slow the process because we know he (And Rudy) were doing the same thing _inside_ Congress by talking to Congressmen.

But unlike talking to Congressmen, disrupting the official actions of Congress is an illegal action. And Trump inciting people to immediately disrupt the official actions of Congress makes him an accessory before the fact, and he can be charged with disrupting the official actions of Congress. He doesn’t need to know it was going to turn into a riot, if he intended it to cause a ten-minute recess for security purposes it was illegal.

(And, a reminder, if it’s found he knew that Proud Boys were going to be doing illegal things, and he took a single overt action to help them, even if that action was completely legal, he’s in a criminal conspiracy. If that’s the case, ‘incitement’ is the least of his problem, he just committed felony murder. See my other post.)Report

DavidTC in reply to Dark Matter says:

Like refusing to send in the national guard?

Yes, and no.

I don’t know if ‘failing to do something’ is an overt act, but it’s entirely possible he altered some existing deployment plan, which would be overt. But…almost anything would be an overt act. Honestly, the rally itself could be. Or his tweets. As long as he is helping a crime along that he is part of, he’s part of the conspiracy.

The question for ‘conspiracy’ is solely: Ddid he talk to the Proud Boys or a group like them (Or did he talk to Rudy, who talked to them) about them doing any criminal act? Even just trespassing.

But if there was no communcation…no, it’s not a conspiracy. And not being part of a conspiracy, it’s not felony murder.

It is still incitement, though. (Well, unless you can prove he was intending to incite a felony, which would make it felony murder…but that’s a higher threshold.)

Sounds like there’s a much stronger case than I thought. Maybe strong enough to get Team Red impeachment votes.

Maybe you haven’t heard, the news is so disjointed, but apparently calling the Senate back into session before the 19th requires unanimous consent, and at least one member has refused. So there is going to be no removal from office.

And if we make it until the 19th, I don’t know why we shouldn’t wait until the 20th and impeach him and bar him from office at our leisure.

I know people getting worried about him getting increasingly desperate, but I think people have failed to notice exactly how incompetent he is, and honestly a good chunk of what he did was done via Twitter and dumb orders and his aides having to make sense of it.

Like, at this point, if his aides all stand back and refuse to help with _anything_, he is functionally not able to do anything anymore.

I know this is a completely insane precedent to be setting, where the president’s staff basically babysit him for two weeks and don’t let him break things. This is why we shouldn’t have allowed ourselves to _get into this situation_.Report

DavidTC in reply to Dark Matter says:

In 2008 Team Blue ends up with the party elites giving the nod to HRC rather than a politically inexperienced Black man from Chicago.

Yes, but there’s a difference between ‘The party elites should pick the candidate’, vs. ‘The party elites should be able to veto candidates that are vastly different than the current party position’. Obama was not some weird outlier, he was a perfectly normal Dem politician.

At least, in theory there’s a difference between those two things. However…allowing a veto certainly could result in a party misusing it to just put their favored candidates forward.

With his media power he could have trivially won a House seat in some Red area in 2012 and/or 2014.

In case anyone thinks that’s improbable, we literally have dumber Representatives than Trump right now. Like Gohmert, who is almost indescribably stupid. (EDIT: Ha, I see Oscar said the same thing.)

Although with Trump…I’m fairly certain he would have gotten immediately bored of a Representative position the second his ‘deal-making’ didn’t work, and rage quit.

…but what we _don’t_ need to do is build entire systems to stop ‘People exactly like Trump’ from being president.

We need to stop lying demagogues with obvious fascist tendencies from becoming president. Not stop ‘Identical Clone of Trump’.

Actually, what we need to do is stop one party from egging on a system of beliefs that leads to people supporting such a person.Report