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Notes -
Trump indicted with 4 counts over 2020 election
Is this really worth paying attention to any more than the last 17 times Trump was supposedly nailed for some criminal activity, and half the country said "got'im!" The last time was just like 2 months ago, and I haven't heard anything about it since then! This is so exhausting. I'll pay attention to this and study up on it once it actually seems different than any previous instance of him being brought under charges.
The prior charges were politically motivated, but these charges are an attempt to openly criminalize dissent itself and hence an existential threat to our democracy.
I'm okay with any politician being thrown in jail for a decade for merely doing what Trump did on his call with Raffensperger.
Which was what exactly? Precisely what did Trump do that was wrong? He said something to the effect of “I think XYZ proves there was fraud of at least ABC. I ‘lost’ by ABC less Y. So you don’t even need to believe all XYZ”
Now maybe you think Trump’s XYZ is nonsense. But the call itself in context was not criminal. This is much like “fine people on both sides.” What gets focused obfuscates the meaning.
The contention is that he knew he lost, and despite that he did all of the above. I don't personally know whether that's true, but the prosecutor thinks he can prove it.
No, the prosecutor knows that it doesn't matter if he can prove it, because the process is the punishment, the judge is an Obama appointee, and the jury will be pulled from DC.
It would at least be legally interesting to compel federal jury selection to better match the national populace than DC specifically. In theory there may be precedent suggesting this, but I can't see it being used seriously in a case like this.
Nor am I really sure what I'd want it to look like: fly in randomly-selected jurors from across the country? Select a local federal court for proceedings by valid dice roll? Honestly most cases probably don't really merit it, but it seems a reasonable precaution for highly politicized cases.
There's an old sci-fi story (Asimov maybe) that I can't seem to find which involves the hunt for the most normal citizen of the country, who will then have his brain scanned by an AI, which will then compute the outcome of the election with 100% accuracy.
My ideal world would involve a jury selected similarly. We simply hunt down the most grill-pilled Iowan, the most relaxed Floridian, and so on, and form the jury from that pool.
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