Replies to post #450650 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[arizona1]

believing the 2020 election for POTUS was rigged is not a crime

That's exactly what Jack Smith said. Read the indictment!

what he is accused of is "acting" on his beliefs

What he acted on was illegal. That's the point! In this country, you go through the courts, which he did and lost 60 times. Al Gore went through the courts and accepted their decision even though after all the votes were counted in FL, it was determined he won. He didn't incite an insurrection.

[hap0206]

So here we go with the new defined "criminal acts"
===========
The Unprecedented Jack Smith
If lying politicians can be prosecuted for ‘fraud,’ as he proposes in the Trump indictment, we’ll need a lot of new prisons.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Aug. 3, 2023 6:32 pm ET
[excerpts]
Take Mr. Trump out of the equation and consider more broadly what even the New York Times calls Mr. Smith’s “novel approach.” A politician can lie to the public, Mr. Smith concedes. Yet if that politician is advised by others that his comments are untruthful and nonetheless uses them to justify acts that undermine government “function,” he is guilty of a conspiracy to defraud the country. Dishonest politicians who act on dubious legal claims? There aren’t enough prisons to hold them all.

Consider how many politicians might already be doing time had prosecutors applied this standard earlier. Both Al Gore and George W. Bush filed lawsuits in the 2000 election that contained bold if untested legal claims. Surely both candidates had advisers who told them privately that they may have legitimately lost—and neither publicly conceded an inch until the Supreme Court resolved the matter. Might an ultimate sore winner have used this approach to indict the loser for attempting to thwart the democratic process?

And why limit the theory to election claims? In 2014 the justices held unanimously that President Barack Obama had violated the Constitution by decreeing that the Senate was in recess so that he could install several appointees without confirmation. It was an outrageous move, one that Mr. Obama’s legal counselors certainly warned was a loser, yet the White House vocally insisted the president had total “constitutional authority” to do it. Under Mr. Smith’s standard, that was a lie that Mr. Obama used to defraud the public by jerry-rigging the function of a labor board with illegal appointments.

What’s the betting someone told President Biden he didn’t have the power to erase $430 billion in student loan debt. Oh, wait! That’s right. He told himself. “I don’t think I have the authority to do it by signing with a pen,” he said in 2021. The House speaker advised him it was illegal: “People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not,” Nancy Pelosi said. Yet Mr. Biden later adopted the lie that he did, and took action to defraud taxpayers by obstructing the federal function of loan processing—until the Supreme Court made him stop.
[...]
The press is rooting for the special counsel to go after Republican lawmakers who on the basis of Mr. Trump’s claims objected to slates of electors on Jan. 6, 2021. Let’s line them all up, including dozens of Democrats who objected to slates in 2001, 2005 and 2017—on the basis of lies and with the purpose of conspiring to obstruct (as the Smith indictment puts it) “the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified.”
[all of it]
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-unprecedented-jack-smith-special-counsel-donald-trump-president-fraud-c076a2ee?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

[fuagf]

hap0206, All sorts of incidences occur in real life in which you know some one is guilty of something without a judge and jury having to tell you so. As you know sometimes they get it tragically wrong too.

Of course, we are all aware of the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. That is how our legal systems are set up to work. And -- putting aside crooked cops who plant evidence and crooked judges who take bribes of some sort or another and jurors who accept a favor for finding for the one who bestows that favor and crooked accountants who fix books to con people -- on balance our systems work fairly well.

However, that said, when you see a pile of shit in front of you you don't need a judge and jury to be able to say reasonably and fairly, that is a pile of shit.

Trump is guilty of what he has been indicted for. Period. Even if a court decides the prosecution has not reached the technical criminal bar/standard required.

[newmedman]

I'm sure there's a shortage of cells in your superior parietal lobule, perhaps even atrophy, but who am I to judge?

so many politions are guilty of such "crimianal actions" there will be a shortage of cells --

I hope you're taking it a little more easy nowadays because you don't make one lick of sense around here anymore.