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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.
Extreme minimization of the symbolic importance of a mob invading the seat of government. According to this perspective, the march on rome was just a health-conscious bald man taking a stroll with friends. Any state in such a situation is justified in using lethal force, and lots of it, way earlier than the US actually did here. It's a threat to democracy in a way burning the whole city of minneapolis to the ground isn't.
This happens routinely. Hell, it happened yesterday. For some reason it doesn’t seem important to the powers that be.
I’m just telling you what a self-respecting sovereign would do in his house. Put one of those ‘we don’t call 911’ signs at the entrance, and machine-gun anyone who enters without knocking.
That's honestly what I'd always assumed would happen if someone tried to jump the fence at the White House until this weird incident:
In retrospect, my perspective seems childish, but I legitimately thought that leaping the fence and running towards the White House would get you sniped, or attacked by guard dogs, or... well, at least something.
I don’t think it’s childish, it’s necessary. Current responses are too soft, dare I say, decadent. It is not unthinkable, and it has happened in history, that one day a mob will just waltz in there, slap the president around a little, declare they’re in charge now, and everyone will go: ‘What are we supposed to do, spill blood? We are civilized, let’s just do what they say and hope for the best“.
It comes down to the same disconnect I talked about last time, that somehow public life does not matter, only your private red lines. This is a gigantic collective red line, representing an almost unfathomable amount of lethal force directed at everybody. If it is not defended, nothing ever should be.
Oh, I mean I was being childish in thinking that the United States would have a competent response.
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