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This is actually even worse than it seems. "Reasonably foreseeable witnesses or the substance of their testimony" could include a vast number of people - what's to say Chutkan can't come down on him for even the mildest political attack ad by saying that Biden is a potential witness for the prosecution? The entire point of this prosecution is to hamper Trump's efforts to campaign, and this is just one of the tools they're using to achieve that goal. The legal theory doesn't actually matter at all, because the point is to hurt Trump's campaign and it doesn't matter if their every decision is immediately revoked upon appeal because they will have hurt Trump in some way. It's not like there could be any reasonable restitution Trump could receive afterwards either.
Alright, I feel like I extremely reluctantly have to be the person to remind everyone that our legislative body was invaded by an angry mob and that a seated session of Congress which was counting electoral votes had to be evacuated in fear for their lives.
It is not unreasonable that the judiciary should think that there should be a trial over these and all the other actions actually at stake in this trial. If there were some dispassionate philosopher-lawyer who cared only for the letter of the law and it's enforcement, I would expect them to want to have a trial on these topics.
I'm not going to claim that the prosecutor or everyone at justice or etc. have no political motivations or desire for revenge or etc. at all, nor that everything is always 100% of the time being done in a perfectly professional and dispassionate way that has nothing to do with politics. Of course that's not true.
But, "The entire point of this prosecution is to hamper Trump's efforts to campaign"?
No, that's a nice side benefit for some of the people involved. There's very plausible crimes being tried here, real things really happened in the real world.
They were invaded by the 2nd politest mob of the covid era. Politest goes to the canadian trucker convoy.
There was only a single death from violence, and it was a protestor shot by security. I think all the other deaths were via heart attack, including the one security guard that people originally claim was attacked with a fire extinguisher.
Nothing was burned down. No one was run over by a car. There were no large scale medieval weapons fights. The "mob" dispersed when asked to.
There were a few groups of FBI informants that roped in a few retards to plan on doing more stuff. They got caught and heavily prosecuted, the same way every other group like this has been caught and prosecuted. The racial makeup and supposed "motivations" of the retards has changed, but the FBI playbook hasn't.
I normally don't care to comment on Trump stuff, but I don't like the massive gaslighting that it feels like we all went through during 2020.
During the summer of 2020 there were massive riots in the streets. Cars, police stations, and businesses burned to the ground and looted. Large physical confrontations in the streets. People out at the wrong time being beaten to death by mobs. It was helpfully pointed out the time that the protestors themselves didn't carry out these beatings or killings. I'm sure the victims of the violence felt much better in their afterlives knowing that their deaths were only tangentially caused by the lawlessness that the protests created.
The health authorities that had insisted on everyone being locked down and not going outside to even mingle within parks also wrote a blank check to these protestors. They were no longer "super spreader" events, but some weird health carve out where protesting police violence somehow made you immune to spreading covid.
That was the context of the January 6th protest. Some people broke some windows and busted down a door, and then a bunch of others just calmly walked through the capital building like they were on tour and took silly photos like it was a fairground. Meanwhile every news station in the country breathlessly talked about the "violence" of the January 6th protest. The same news stations that were talking about the "peaceful" protests that same summer as buildings burned in the background of the newscast.
"They interrupted an important government function" - someone, hopefully not you
No, they interrupted a ceremony of the state religion. The presidential level of politics isn't a place of law and order, its a place of feelings, perception, and group consensus. At most it caused the equivalent of a rain delay, and it was all still done within a day. There was no plausible way that delaying the ceremonies on January 6th would have impacted who was president for the 2020-2024 term. Even if the ceremony had somehow never happened, Biden would still have become president. Because most of the US government acknowledged him as such.
The January 6th incident has caused the media to invent this weird perception that our government is one delayed ceremony away from being overthrown. As if every top leader in the country is a rules following robot, where if the proper procedures aren't exactly followed then they'll just collapse in a heap and stop functioning. We are supposed to believe this despite mountains of evidence to the contrary ... the explicit rules of the constitution have been broken many times, and the typical reaction, if there is any at all, is a collective shrug.
Arguably that is the most important government function. The shared illusion we all (for a given value of all) pretend to believe. The ceremony is more important than the actual way the system works. Any threat to that isn't a physical or procedural threat, it is in fact an existential threat to the entire edifice. Almost any type of government from feudal to oligarchic to democratic to republican has legitimacy as long as people believe in the ceremonies, whether that is the crowning of the King enshrining their Divine Right to rule or the counting of electoral college votes enshrining the victor has been chosen by The People.
We can run out onto the air off a ledge as long as we all agree not to look down...
A ceremony is supposed to symbolize something.
In this case a ritualized agreement that 'hey it was a good fight in the election, but we all agree it was fair, and we will now crown the winner'.
The obvious problem is that it didn't actually symbolize that for a decent portion of the country. I personally believe the actual votes were generally tallied correctly, but that it was not a "fair" election in many other senses of the word.
January 6th broke the symbol, but they certainly didn't break what it was supposed to symbolize. That was slowly broken over the preceding four years, and then quickly and fully broken in 2020.
I also generally believe that attacking symbols of a group is a bit more civilized than the alternative ... which is just directly targeting people in that group. When foreign protestors burn the American flag, its sometimes because they don't have an actual American to burn or behead. Taking a crap on pelosi's desk is better than showing up to her home and taking a hammer to her husband.
Oh sure, they had already lost faith in the symbology, for sure, they had already looked down so to speak. And on a personal scale you are correct attacking a symbol is much less severe than a person.
On a civilizational scale though, people are replaceable, shared symbols are not (though their physical representations can be). Very few people are as individually important as a shared belief system to the stability of a polity.
It feels very much like blaming a whistleblower for the crimes they uncover.
Or the toxic relationship equivalent of a guy calling his ex-fiancee "crazy" for throwing away the engagement ring when she caught him cheating. Yes, I get it dude, it was a $5000 ring, but maybe its your fault for cheating and ruining the relationship in the first place?
What people tend to forget is that a symbol being destroyed only really matters when the thing it symbolized has been hollowed out and rendered useless. If there had been a freak accident and the capital building was rendered unuseable on that day in January 6th, would democracy have been in danger? No, obviously not. They would have just reconvened and done the thing again. If that $5000 ring had been lost but they were a happy loving couple, its not like they would have called the wedding off. Even when the Capital buildings were burned down in the war of 1812 it was not a real threat to "democracy" or republican rule. Those institutions were strong at the time, and it meant they just put the symbol right back up and it continued to have meaning. And the fresh coat of white paint to cover up the burnt sections just became a fun new little tradition.
Sure, we're looking at a meta standpoint here. At this level we're not looking to blame individuals. At this level their behaviors are outcomes of society wide events and situations. Jan 6th is a symptom, and part of a cascade.
If you want to arrest the cascade (ie, you think the illusion is still worth propping up) you might need to take action against individuals/groups. But at this level they aren't specifically to blame, more agents of what social events are going on.
Is prosecuting Jan 6th protestors going to be the white coat of paint? Or the catalyst for further symbol failing.
Is the guy prosecuting his ex-fiancee for theft of the $5000 ring really hoping to have a harmonious marriage with her in the future?
If they were hoping to repair the broken symbology Harris should have made a point to pardon the most obviously peaceful protestors. Then she should have launched an investigation into the timing of the vaccine news release. Then launched an investigation into the people at the FBI responsible for suppressing the story about the former president's son and his corrupt dealings with Ukraine. Another large investigation would have been launched into the handling of the security at the event.
The outcome should have been a massive reform of the FBI, specifically making sure they get rid of all their "setup the retards to do terrorism" campaigns. An explicit expectation of non-partisanship, and a removal of the FBI and CIA from all internal political disputes.
And invite Trump to speak at Biden's funeral. The president passed peacefully in the night, two months into his presidency. Trump can hopefully be trusted to say a few nice things. He then is forced to retire from politics as the new old age restriction is added to the constitution. Trump goes back to being a cultural icon, and talking shit about how he is healthier than the young guys currently running.
That is the alternate history where I see things sorta kinda working out. The actual history we got looks like the American people saying "fuck it, lets try this again until you learn the lesson or we break this country apart".
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