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Agreed. On my read of the actual indictment, there are multiple purposes, and the crosstalk between them is what causes confusion of your type concerning what parts are supposed to support what charges. One purpose is to just yell "Trump falsely claimed" over and over again to provide negative affect and rally the troops. Another purpose is to actually present a cogent case, possibly one that could convince folks who are skeptical of the variety of different indictments as being thinly-veiled lawfare against a major political competitor.
Disclaimer: I'm a perennial skeptic on most of the various charges to date; I vastly prefer that we lived in a world where most of the facts presented in this indictment never happened; they are truly moving democracy in the wrong direction; nevertheless, I think it's important to be clearheaded about what is alleged, whether it's actually criminal, and why.
So the first thing I think the skeptic does is to ignore basically all the fluff about the former purpose. If you just read pretty much all the "Defendant falsely claimed" statements as "Defendant believed" (though perhaps was just wrong on the facts, once they all come to light), then nearly 90% of this indictment simply disappears. It's certainly not a crime to just be wrong on the facts or to have a situation where some people are saying one thing and others are saying another result in you believing the wrong thing, even if your belief is heavily influenced by personal political motivations (i.e., you really want to believe that there was something nefarious).
Then, I think what is nearly the only sentence in the indictment that might matter is "66. On the same day, at the direction of the Defendant and Co-Conspirator 1, fraudulent electors convened sham proceedings..." This is what needs to be fleshed out to convince the skeptic. AFAICT, nearly every other sentence about the fake elector scheme is pointing only to "co-conspirators". They quote conversations between other folks, but what did Trump actually do here, and what was his level of knowledge (required for the charge)? If they had quotes, one would imagine they would be dropped here alongside the others. 63 is trying to build the case for knowledge of Co-Conspirators 1/6. "...it's a crazy play so I don't know who wants to put their name on it." "Certifying illegal votes." '...none of them could "stand by it".' These are things straight out of a Matt Levine article that you don't want to have in your indictment, but usually when Levine is pointing them out, it's because it is a quote directly from the defendant or a quote of something said directly to the defendant ("Can you believe we're getting away with this crime?" sort of thing.) But even here, probably the best smoking gun they could muster for the knowledge requirement (otherwise they would have included better), it's still two layers away from Trump (co-conspirators 1/6 aren't even alleged to be part of this conversation, so at best, this is really "other people disagreed in their private conversations, elsewhere"). In a non-politicized trial of just a regular defendant, they would absolutely need to build a better record than this at trial to secure a conviction. Perhaps that could be done at trial, but at least as far as the document we have goes, it's still significantly lacking.
EDIT: I didn't want to actually dig up a real example from a real Matt Levine article when I wrote this, but I'm reading today's column, and it has a perfect example that has come up before:
Now that's how you drop a quote in an indictment to show that a particular individual has real knowledge that he's part of a conspiracy to commit illegal acts!
This is the rub for me, on almost all of this. If the people involved actually believed the election was stolen nothing outside of the Jan 6 event is criminal. If you believe that your state committed vote fraud, then you certainly would send a protest slate of electors, especially if the only avenue remaining is that the electors are disputed. If you believed that the election had been stolen from you, you absolutely would seek redress in the courts. You absolutely would be screaming from the housetops. And if you believed that the government was stealing the presidency from your tribe, you’d absolutely go to the Capitol to protest.
To me, the mob doesn’t matter much, because getting a mob of angry people to do something stupid is easy. Maybe a cop shoves a protester, maybe someone simply suggested the riots, maybe somebody threw a rock. But if you have a crowd of angry people that feel that their country has stolen political power from them, especially in the numbers present, a riot of some sort was going to happen. People riot after winning the cup in major sporting events. It takes nothing more than high emotions and some precipitating event.
I think the best way to tease this apart is to ask the counter factual of if the election had been stolen and people knew it, how would their behavior be any different than what we actually saw. And I just don’t see anything where I can put my fingers down and say “if they thought the election was stolen, why did they do this”. Everything seems pretty consistent with the idea that Trump and his inner circle absolutely believed in the stolen election. Being mistaken isn’t a crime.
Depends on the crime. Some laws operate on strict liability - I drove through a red light honestly believing that it was green, but I still broke the law by doing so. And yes, this does mean that you can commit crimes entirely by accident.
Some laws operate on a "reckless disregard for the truth" standard. That is, you have some responsibility to ensure that the beliefs you are acting on are in fact true. So if you are mistaken, that can be a crime if it the truth of the situation was knowable to you and you chose not to look. This typically applies in defamation law - you can't just say any crazy lie and say "but your honour I really believed he was a pedo" and get away with it.
Being mistaken often is not a crime. But it's not true as a blanket statement.
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