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Notes -
This dropped a few hours ago:
Jan. 6 Committee Refers Former President Trump for Criminal Prosecution https://archive.vn/TDlGb#selection-289.14-297.189
Jan 6 committee refers Donald Trump for criminal prosecution on four counts – as it happened
I doubt these go anywhere. Partially because the evidence I've seen ties lots of high level Trump advisors to various parts of this scheme (Eastman, Stone) but not much for Trump himself and partially because it'll be a million times easier to prosecute him on his theft of government property.
Like, what would you rather try to prove in court?
Option A: Trump was the head of a shadowy conspiracy involving a good deal of his inner circle to coordinate a complicated legal plot involving fake electors and a riot targeting his VP.
or
Option B: Trump lied (or directed an intermediary to lie) to Christina Bobb about compliance with a subpoena.
If I were a Lawyer working for paycheck I'd pick B) but I think that a lot of the knowledge-worker/political class are high enough on their own supply that they might actually try for A) and be surprised when negotiations with the Railroad Workers union break down.
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So, suppose the Biden Justice Department prosecutes. And the case is tried in DC, where the chances of getting a jury of 12 Democratic partisans is "better than average". And so they convict him on all counts. I'd say chances of a real insurrection before 2024 rise to over 10% in that case, and prospect of convincing any Trump supporter that the government (present or future) is legitimate drops to very close to zero. I don't think the republic can survive it without violence, whether immediate or in a somewhat longer term. Even a 2024 Desantis win wouldn't calm things down, unless Desantis took clear retribution (and then you have to worry about the OTHER half of the country).
Criminal prosecution of Trump on obviously political charges is entirely insane.
Yes, this. It boggles the mind that people ranting about the threat to ‘our democracy’ due to partisanship will do… things like this. Really convinces me that their definition of democracy is just that they win.
I've always felt that the most important part of the phrase "our democracy" must not be "democracy" but rather "ours". If you read it properly as "[The Left's] democracy" there's no hypocrisy at all in what they're saying.
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America's Newspaper of record
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Which is why I don't think it will happen. The Jan 6th committee makes its recommendation, the Justice Department issues some non-committal "not going ahead" statement that implies he's guilty but there is this pesky technicality which means he can't be charged, and all the people who believe Trump was planning a coup will feel vindicated and the Democrats have their next two years of support sewn up.
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I've long thought that this sort of action would see state-level retributive lawfare from right-leaning partisans. Could Arizona bring state murder (or conspiracy) charges against Holder and/or Obama for their actions to supply firearms (and later, conspiracy after the fact to cover it up) in the murder of Brian Terry? Or the drone strikes on US citizens Anwar al-Awlaki and his underage children (assuming their last domestic state of residence have sufficient jurisdiction)?
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm not aware of any requirement that state courts observe a federal notion of executive privilege. The optics of removing the case to federal court to close it would also be pretty unsightly: arguing that the President can effectively engage in murder regardless of state laws sounds unpopular on the left, and indirectly hearkens back to the Trump claim that he could "shoot somebody and wouldn't lose voters."
On the other hand, maybe I overestimate the concern of the median voter for esoteric legal shenanigans. Also, the right is fairly divided on the idea of Trump at the moment and might well be willing to throw him under the bus rather than seek retribution.
This type of argument always confused me. Obama's actions were blatantly illegal and that seems like a pretty popular opinion in any left-leaning circle I've discussed politics in. You couldn't talk up Obama too much during his presidency too long without someone killing the conversation by dejectedly saying "drone strikes" (and I do mean literally the phrase "drone strikes" as a complete utterance; this happened to me multiple times). Sending every living former president to prison for life for war crimes would be overwhelmingly popular among the left.
It's probably colored by things like center-left and left media calling the Obama administration scandal free in 2017 and 2015 respectively. Keeping in mind that Anwar al-Awlaki was 2011, the wedding drone strike was 2013 and the ATF Gunwalking was uncovered in 2014.
Yeah, war crimes aren't scandals, they're just normal.
I think people complaining about Obama's stance on drone strikes started earlier. Probably because it was a new thing towards the end of Bush's presidency and Obama was a progressive darling who was pretty vague on his policies as a candidate, so I think the anti-war part of the left felt pretty betrayed that he didn't stop them immediately.
So normal that those same outlets published op-eds that the Bush administration should be tried for war crimes?
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Honestly, as a member of the Left, the muted response to Biden basically shutting down the drone war and getting out of Afghanistan showed me while there are some honest brokers among the anti-war left who spent 8 years attacking Obama, but many of them are just anti-Democratic Party, not anti-war. Not even getting into the small group of contarians who acted like Trump was a peacemaker, then ignored Biden actually being the least war hawkish POTUS since probably Carter or some guy in the early 20th century.
Al-Zawahiri was drone struck in Afghanistan a full year after the withdrawal. The strike on civilians in a white corolla the month after the Kabul withdrawal is also somewhat suspect in terms of "shutting down the drone war" but close enough in time that most would let it slide. Combat operations in Iraq may have ended but they and Syria to this day still get to operate under the active hostility area rules of drone strike engagement allowing local commanders to order them rather than the stricter (but not flat denial) policy of requiring White House approval for striking outside those areas. Close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and drone warfare policy?
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The principle you want is not executive privilege but rather Sovereign Immunity. The Supreme Court answered this question all the way back in 1890, ruling that federal officers are immune from prosecution by state authorities when acting within the scope of their federal duties (as I think would be the case for all your examples here).
That sounds right, but I think there is some room for debate (in particular, in the court of public opinion) about whether "within the scope of their federal duties" includes targeted assassinations and literal (and incompetent) firearms trafficking. I think both sides would probably be wary of allowing such an explicit precedent, but quietly closing the case does seem a likely outcome.
Nobody is thinking about precedent right now. The J6 committee dog-and-pony show teaches us this almost exactly; it’s all temporary battle-winning for one side.
It's about permanent war-winning. You don't have to worry about "precedent" if your side remains in control.
Prosecuting Trump doesn’t actually do that, all it does is piss off the red tribe.
Making it clear that even if you win an election you're just going to end up in jail does a good job of deterring the other party. Same as disbarring Giuliani for having the temerity to challenge the (rather irregular) Pennsylvania election. Yes, this pisses people off, but the idea is to let them know they have no options besides submission and (futile) violence.
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That's what worries me, the beltway/journo-list crowd seem to have genuinely bought into their own hype.
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Interestingly Ex parte Young points a little in this direction. Ex parte Young held that when state officials act contrary to the federal constitution they cannot be acting in the scope of their official duties (since their official duties cannot entail unconstitutional acts) and so they cannot avail themselves of the protections of sovereign immunity.
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Don't Trump supporters already think the government is illegitimate? They just can't do much about it - the government has more than enough power to infiltrate and subvert nascent movements. The Jan 6 'coup attempt' didn't even feature a single shot fired from the 'insurrectionists'. This coming from the people who own all the guns and are obsessed with guns. I still don't understand how anyone thinks it was any kind of threat - or how the official narrative explains an unarmed mob getting inside a secured building without assistance from the inside. Are we to believe you can just break down the doors of a building designed to resist terror attacks?
The most interesting thing about the Turner Diaries in my view was that the rebels had this incredibly effective lie-detection drug that they could use to screen out 100% of govt infiltration attempts. Even so they had only a limited time to act, soon there would be this computerized ID card system that would enable them to identify and check everyone's location in real time. This would squelch their terror attacks and attrit down their ranks. But the 1970s idea of ultimate state control is quaint now, they have AI assisted facial recognition from CCTV, phone-tracking, the internet and so on.
My conclusion is that the structural conditions for successful insurrection or revolution in the US are very very poor. However, I agree that it will still end in violence, once the US starts losing wars and its privileged position in the world economy.
Not today Fed.
He may work for a national government, but I don't think it's the US's
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Are you asking us to playbook out an insurrection to argue against you? Understand that I am hesitant to go beyond the following: The infrastructure that allows for domestic surveillance has a physical location just like the people.
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Given the makeup of the committee, it was always going to be so. They could have unearthed emails from Trump to Pelosi, the Capitol Police, FBI, and National guard telling them to quadruple security, and Pelosi replying "hahaha no, we're gonna Reichstag this one on you" and they wouldn't have let such a thing see the light of day, or influence their opinion on what happened.
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I wish they hadn't done this, but now that they have, I'd like it better if they followed through and arrested him, rather than threatening it and never following through. Issuing a steady stream of threats and never following through is worse than following through.
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Really trying to spray gasoline on the culture war fire, here. That’s almost literally all it is, and no doubt the red tribe will have a renewed persecution complex while the country gets steadily farther apart.
Like the DNC does get that deescalating partisanship takes participation from both sides, and that getting democracy coded as meaning ‘anti-red tribe’ to large parts of the population is a terrible thing?
And why not? They control the cultural high ground. There will never be a better time for them to maximally escalate the war.
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I suspect that a lot of Democrats, especially those amongst the upper leadership, are succumbing to the same sort of mindset that @the_nybbler does in this thread here They believe in their heart of hearts that credibility is imposed by the elite, and that if they are able to successfully indict and convict Trump that his supporters will be forced to shut up and back down. The possibility that Trump's supporters might reject the legitimacy of the charges is dismissed out of hand because that would imply that their model of authority and credibility as things that are imposed by the elite rather than emergent properties is incorrect. And if a fundamental tenet of liberalism can be negated that easily what does that say about the rest of the the democratic party platform?
They're right that credibility is imposed by the elite; all the right-thinking people already believe Trump is guilty, and they hold power and don't care what the "deplorables" believe because after all, what can the "deplorables" do about it even if they do "reject the legitimacy of the charges"? But the right's threshold for violence is not impossibly high, as January 6 proved (for a small, not too bright, segment of hotheads), and aside from just having Trump shot out of hand, I don't see much more likely to trigger it than a political prosecution.
(I also think if the right does try anything, they'll be crushed, but that leaves the republic still broken)
How can "the republic be broken" if credibility is imposed by the elite?
Either credibility is an emergent property or it is not.
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These guys may yet make Trump 2024 candidate, despite his own best efforts.
Hillary tried to make Trump the 2016 candidate (they succeeded, but lost), and the Dems in 2022 tried to make Trump's Senate picks the GOP candidates (they succeeded, and trounced those candidates), so it's really just a return to form at this point.
Not sure if it'll work. I think the GOP base is coming around to seeing Trump as incompetent. If the deep state screws you once, you're a martyr. If the deep state screws you twice a week for eight years running, you're a loser.
There's definitely some souring towards Trump, but I am not sure it's enough to overcome his previous popularity. And Trump is an extremely sore loser, so if he loses the primary, he'd do everything in his power to make Republicans lose the elections. But I am not convinced he'd lose the primaries - the only candidate who can stand on the level with him is DeSantis, and he's so far not shown much interest in running - which is a smart move IMO, if lets Trump play out in 2024 then in 2028 he'd be received as a savior, if he doesn't do anything stupid. With Dems still hyping up Trump's popularity, I expect him to win 2024 primaries and lose 2024 elections.
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