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The Nation: Immunity Doesn't Apply to Trump for January 6 [View all]
Fernando Oliver, Esq.
Immunity Doesn’t Apply to Trump for January 6 | The Nation
4:28 PM · Oct 4, 2024
Immunity Doesn’t Apply to Trump for January 6 | The Nation
4:28 PM · Oct 4, 2024
The Nation (archived) - Immunity Doesn’t Apply to Trump for January 6
A new filing by special counsel Jack Smith argues that even in light of the Supreme Court ruling granting immunity to presidents, a seeker of office is liable for criminal activity.
Chris Lehmann
Politics / October 4, 2024
Despite the heroic exertions of Donald Trump to dismiss, downplay, and otherwise memory-hole his shameful role in fomenting the MAGA coup attempt on January 6, 2021, that deranged moment in Republican political history keeps resurfacing, like the madwoman in the attic in a Victorian novel. In this week’s vice -presidential debate, the standout exchange occurred near the end, when JD Vance brazenly lied about the transfer of power to the Biden White House as a smooth and peaceful affair. Then, when confronted by his opponent, Tim Walz, on the key question of whether he believed Trump lost the 2020 election, Vance refused to answer, saying he was only “speaking about the future.”
Well, January 6 is the future should Trump reassume the presidency, and federal prosecutor Jack Smith, who is leading the long-delayed prosecution of Trump for his central role in promoting the coup attempt, drove that point home in unmistakable terms with a newly released filing in support of his indictment. Smith had been forced to revamp his case with a superseding indictment this August, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ludicrous, Trump-osculating decision granting unfathomably broad executive immunity protections to the presidency. The new 165-page filing from Smith supplies a detailed factual foundation for his argument that Trump doesn’t come under these expansive new immunity protections when it comes to the election he was acting to overturn, since “where the defendant is acting as an office-seeker, not an office-holder, no immunity attaches.”
The chronology in the filing’s finding of fact makes it clear just how manic and deranged Trump was in seeking to cling to the presidency—to the point of deliberately dismissing the actual outcome of the election. During Trump’s months-long crusade to discredit the balloting, without a shred of evidence, one White House staffer overheard him telling his nepo-adjutants Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”
That was the de facto motto of the whole unfounded assault on a free and fair election. As election officials in downtown Detroit continued to count ballots the day after the election, a group of GOP protesters, high on bogus “stop the steal” rhetoric, tried to break into the building and disrupt the count. An operative at the scene texted a Trump campaign official—whose identity is redacted in the filing, but who appears to be the campaign’s elections operations director, Mike Roman. That campaign official had initially parried an earlier text indicating that the counting was legitimate with the directive, “Find a reason it isn’t.” Now told that the confrontation could explode into another “Brooks Brothers riot”—the Roger Stone–orchestrated campaign op that stymied a critical recount effort in Florida after the 2000 election—the official replied, “Make them riot. Do it!!!”
/snip
A new filing by special counsel Jack Smith argues that even in light of the Supreme Court ruling granting immunity to presidents, a seeker of office is liable for criminal activity.
Chris Lehmann
Politics / October 4, 2024
Despite the heroic exertions of Donald Trump to dismiss, downplay, and otherwise memory-hole his shameful role in fomenting the MAGA coup attempt on January 6, 2021, that deranged moment in Republican political history keeps resurfacing, like the madwoman in the attic in a Victorian novel. In this week’s vice -presidential debate, the standout exchange occurred near the end, when JD Vance brazenly lied about the transfer of power to the Biden White House as a smooth and peaceful affair. Then, when confronted by his opponent, Tim Walz, on the key question of whether he believed Trump lost the 2020 election, Vance refused to answer, saying he was only “speaking about the future.”
Well, January 6 is the future should Trump reassume the presidency, and federal prosecutor Jack Smith, who is leading the long-delayed prosecution of Trump for his central role in promoting the coup attempt, drove that point home in unmistakable terms with a newly released filing in support of his indictment. Smith had been forced to revamp his case with a superseding indictment this August, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ludicrous, Trump-osculating decision granting unfathomably broad executive immunity protections to the presidency. The new 165-page filing from Smith supplies a detailed factual foundation for his argument that Trump doesn’t come under these expansive new immunity protections when it comes to the election he was acting to overturn, since “where the defendant is acting as an office-seeker, not an office-holder, no immunity attaches.”
The chronology in the filing’s finding of fact makes it clear just how manic and deranged Trump was in seeking to cling to the presidency—to the point of deliberately dismissing the actual outcome of the election. During Trump’s months-long crusade to discredit the balloting, without a shred of evidence, one White House staffer overheard him telling his nepo-adjutants Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”
That was the de facto motto of the whole unfounded assault on a free and fair election. As election officials in downtown Detroit continued to count ballots the day after the election, a group of GOP protesters, high on bogus “stop the steal” rhetoric, tried to break into the building and disrupt the count. An operative at the scene texted a Trump campaign official—whose identity is redacted in the filing, but who appears to be the campaign’s elections operations director, Mike Roman. That campaign official had initially parried an earlier text indicating that the counting was legitimate with the directive, “Find a reason it isn’t.” Now told that the confrontation could explode into another “Brooks Brothers riot”—the Roger Stone–orchestrated campaign op that stymied a critical recount effort in Florida after the 2000 election—the official replied, “Make them riot. Do it!!!”
/snip
Criminal!
Link to tweet