We begin today with Peter Grier, Patrik Jonsson, and Henry Gass of The Christian Science Monitor pointing out that a jury in Trump’s Jan. 6 case will need to determine Trump’s state of mind in order to reach a verdict.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Mr. Trump on charges that he attempted to subvert the 2020 election is a sweeping document that touches on the bedrock functions of American democracy. The indictment alleges the former president engaged in three conspiracies with a crew of aides and advisers: one to defraud the United States of lawful government, another to corruptly obstruct the Jan. 6 Electoral College proceedings, and a third to conspire against the people’s right to vote.
But one of its main themes, twining through the document’s 45 pages, is honesty – or rather, its alleged lack. Four sentences in, special counsel Smith charges that for months after the election, Mr. Trump spread lies that the result had been flipped by fraud and that he was the true victor.
“These claims were false, and the defendant knew they were false,” states the indictment. […]
The outcome of crucial parts of the case could thus depend on a jury’s belief about Mr. Trump’s state of mind – a difficult judgment when it comes to a man whose career has often involved bombast, stubbornness, and, at the least, a fondness for exaggeration.
Charles Blow of The New York Times says that the indictment, itself, is a “must-read.”
The indictment is the harrowing, true-life story of how a former president pushed our democracy perilously close to the edge and remains a threat to push it over.
Avid consumers of news and those of us in the news business can grow cold to this kind of development. We track revelations in real time. We read the stories and the books as they’re written. We watch television interviews and listen to podcasts. For us, the indictment may feel anticlimactic, just a bit farther down judicial and political lines laid like parallel train tracks. […]
Most people don’t follow each iteration of a story, not because they’re uninterested but because they’re distracted. Their lives are happening. They’re trying to grab coffee for the commute, worrying about the rent getting paid, trying to remember if they signed the permission slip and nervously eying the fuel gauge as the indicator creeps toward E.
For that reason, the absorbable — and quite absorbing — summary that the indictment represents is crucial. Among other virtues, it isn’t written in dense legalese. It’s a drama that takes readers into Trump’s thinking. It allows them to see not only what lies Trump is accused of telling, but also how he viewed the things he said at the time he said them.
Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post explains why there are no violations of Number 45’s First Amendment rights contained in the federal charges against Trump.
Just because words are involved in the commission of these alleged crimes does not mean that prosecuting Trump violates his First Amendment rights. The protections of the First Amendment are strong and capacious, but they are not unlimited.
Corporate executives accused of defrauding investors by making false statements engage in speech, but that does not immunize them. Same for those who engage in insider trading or a conspiracy to fix prices.
Or, to bring things closer to home, if Trump at a rally encouraged his supporters to beat up a protester, that would not prevent him from being sued or even criminally charged. If he were to falsely accuse a political opponent of being a child molester, the libel laws that he wants to weaken would not shield him from legal recourse. (Here, I am borrowing examples from U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, ruling in a civil case that Trump could be sued for inciting the Capitol rioters.) […]
Thus, the indictment doesn’t accuse Trump of breaking the law by claiming the election was stolen. It asserts, instead, that Trump, “on the pretext of baseless fraud claims,” pushed state officials to ignore the popular vote; that he organized “fraudulent slates of electors,” including some who were “tricked into participating,” and that and his co-conspirators “used knowingly false claims of election fraud” to pressure the vice president to refuse to certify the election results.
Walter Shapiro of The New Republic points out that Trump’s new federal indictments probably won’t change anything electorally for Republicans.
Even teasing out the polling effects of Trump’s two prior indictments is tricky, since these legal charges did not occur in isolation. Perhaps the smartest post-indictment commentary comes from FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich: “The unprecedented nature of an ex-president and active presidential candidate being indicted three times in less than six months makes it very hard to predict what will happen to his polling numbers.”
By chance, Indictment Day came just after The New York Timesballyhooed a national poll showing that Trump was lapping the field for the Republican nomination. This was widely interpreted as taps for Ron DeSantis and the other lagging GOP contenders, with The Washington Post breathlessly headlining its analysis: “Nobody has lost a primary after holding a lead like Trump’s.” […]
Buried in the Times/Sienna College Poll is an intriguing question about the priorities of likely GOP primary voters. Even though 78 percent of Republicans have a “very unfavorable” view of Joe Biden, beating him is not their highest priority. By a margin of 59 percent to 38 percent, Republicans in the poll say that agreeing with a candidate on the issues is more important than defeating the Democratic incumbent.
Who better to wrap up today’s indictment-palooza section than Charles Pierce of Esquire?
One thing was attempting to harsh my mellow on a fine Wednesday morning. It is the knowledge that, if a judge rules that El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago must submit to electronic monitoring, it will take his campaign about 11 seconds to produce fake ankle-monitors with TRUMP 2024 emblazoned on them. In a more distant future, I can imagine T-shirts reading, “My President Is In Prison.” And the members of the cult will gobble them up as fast as the merch people can crank them out. That depresses me.
Otherwise, I think people should cool their jets on the whole Momentous History Takes for a while. This is going to be a criminal trial. There will be a judge and a jury. There will be a prosecution team and a defense team. It is helpful, I think, to start thinking about all of these things as merely complex criminal trials, and not as turning points for our nation. It’s not that I don’t recognize the enormity of the crimes of which the former president* is now accused. It’s just that too much pious hot air pumped into the case will cause it to float away from the tawdry reality of how the former president* went about those crimes. Also, too much of that pious hot-air will crowd out the fundamental joy that any true friend of the American republic feels in their hearts. I am no more “saddened” by the former president*’s latest indictment than I was saddened when they finally busted Whitey Bulger. In fact, I am positively gleeful. I am, for example, very taken by the flying elbow thrown by Jack Smith, who comes off the top rope in the very first sentence of the indictment.
The Defendant, DONALD J. TRUMP, was the forty-fifth President of the United States and a candidate for re-election in 2020. The Defendant lost the 2020 presidential election.
Death by simple declarative sentence.
Reading the indictment carefully, you find yourself drawn inexorably toward Count Four — the charge that the former president engaged in a conspiracy against the rights of voters. This is the one that’s based on a provision of the Enforcement Act passed in 1870, a law aimed to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1868, aka The Ku Klux Klan Act. This is the one that has set much of the MAGA set howling about the unfairness of it all. But it also is the count that sums up the other three. All of the various plots and schemes set out in the other three counts of the indictment all come down to a massive conspiracy to deny the effective franchise to voters in Georgia and Arizona, and Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In a way, Smith has arraigned the entire voter-suppression program that the conservative movement has put the Republican party behind. Here, Count Four says, here is where all the tricks and traps set out in state laws inevitably lead.
Sara Luterman of The19thNews writes that for far too many disabled people— even for U.S. Senators like Illinois’ own Tammy Duckworth— there is still too little access in spite of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
“We got all dressed up in pink, and my girls put on their sparkly shoes,” Duckworth told The 19th.
But there was a problem: When they arrived, Duckworth could not enter the theater. She uses a wheelchair, and the single elevator was broken. She ended up sitting outside while her daughters went up to the movie without her.
“They didn’t have [information about the broken elevator] posted anywhere. If I had known, I wouldn’t have come all that way and disappointed my girls,” Duckworth said. Her ticket was refunded and she was given a pass to come back when the elevator is repaired, but it is unclear when that will be. The 19th called the theater multiple times to ask, but did not receive a response.
Thirty-three years after the Americans with Disabilities Act legally required access, much of American life is still inaccessible. This is true even for a U.S. senator.
Jonathan Watts of the Guardian reports that deforestation in the Amazon has fallen by about 60 percent since Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office as earlier this year.
The exact figure, which is based on the Deter satellite alert system, will be released in the coming days, but independent analysts described the preliminary data as “incredible” and said the improvement compared with the same month last year could be the best since 2005.
The rapid progress highlights the importance of political change. A year ago, under the far-right then president, Jair Bolsonaro, the Amazon was suffering one of the worst cutting and burning seasons in recent history. But since a new administration led by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took power at the start of the year, the government has penalised land grabbers, mounted paramilitary operations to drive out illegal miners, demarcated more indigenous land and created more conservation areas.
The results will bolster Lula, Marina and other Brazilian hosts of an Amazon summit designed to strengthen regional cooperation that will take place in Belém on 8-9 August with the participation of eight rainforest nations: Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Guyana and Suriname.
The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, issued another warning Tuesday that he will not let up in his efforts to defeat the gangs (maras) that sow terror across the Central American country. The controversial president announced a new operation in his war against criminal organizations, which includes a military siege in an area in the center of the country to prevent gang members from being able to move freely and to break their supply chains. The new offensive includes the mobilization of 7,000 military personnel and 1,000 heavily armed police. Bukele has said that the siege will be maintained until “the operatives can extract all gang members.”
The militarized zone includes the central province of Cabañas, an agricultural and cattle-raising region where, according to the government, gangs maintain extensive control, extort money from residents and mete out violence. Combating this is the justification Bukele has used since March 2022, when he launched a crackdown against the maras that included the imposition of a state of emergency that gives the executive branch free rein to act against criminal groups. This institutional tool suspends citizens’ constitutional guarantees and has allowed authorities to arbitrarily detain more than 70,000 people, in the absence of evidence that they belong to gangs. This security strategy has been strongly criticized by human rights organizations, which have denounced the disproportionate use of force against civilians, torture and disappearances, the deaths of prisoners in custody, and the censorship and persecution of critical voices.
Have the best possible day, everyone!
Chitown Kev
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