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The federal case against Trump seems to boil down to if you challenge an election then you have to be correct or you are going to jail. That doesn't seem to be a good precedent to set. He is being prosecuted for things that are entirely legal and people have done before in the past and have not been prosecuted for.
Wait, who's the other president who tried to get their VP to reject legitimate election results?
I don't think that is a fair characterization of what people wanted the Pence to do. The problem was after certification occurred even if the fraud was found it would be unlikely that the courts would allow the final result as certified to be overturned. The idea was to send the contested results back to the states so the irregularities could be properly investigated before certification.
The most similar election was in 1876. It didn't involve the VP rejecting certification himself and infact there was controversy over who had the power to count the votes during certification but there are very strong parallels and no-one was prosecuted for what happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1876_United_States_presidential_election
Tbf 76 wasn't handled by our current laws because those laws were designed in response to 76. From Goodyear's "President Garfield":
The Compromise of 77 narrative is also somewhat contrived. Grant had already decided it was time to withdraw troops from the South and Hayes agreed that he would follow him in this policy; they made their decision well in advance of the general election (Garfield approved as well). Likewise, the Democrats at the Wormely meeting who offered to end the Democratic fillibuster were rebuffed because they had no power over their party to actually make this happen, and indeed the fillibuster continued after the meeting, suggesting no deal was made. It wasn't really a meaningful offer anyway - the vote count had already begun and the results were certain, the only issue was how long it would take the fillibuster to end.
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That’s insane. One of those bits of history that gets glossed over in high school, and summed up as “this Rutherford guy ended Reconstruction.”
Worth noting that after the debacle, Congress specifically clarified the situation via law. The Eastman strategy tried to get around this by appealing to Jefferson’s precedent. I don’t know how that was supposed to make the ECA unconstitutional, but I guess that’s why I’m not a partisan law professor.
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... Were you not awake for 2016 or 2000?
Apparently not if I missed Obama trying to prevent the transfer of power to Trump after the election! Can you give me any more details about it?
They did extra legal things to harm the Trumps administration ability to do anything. General Flynn having to answer Logan Act violation issues is a big deal to me since no one has ever been prosecuted under the Logan Act so the fbi attacking him for it was extremely extra-legal.
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I seem to recall this big controversy about the crossfire hurricane thing.
And you know that SCOTUS case in 2000.
There is a big difference between using recount laws for the purpose for which they were intended (even if those recount laws later turn out to be unconstitutional) and filing lies with the court. Neither Bush nor Gore was ever accused of filing briefs containing false factual claims - the key facts of Bush v Gore (that recounting punch card ballots accurately was sufficiently difficult that there wasn't time for an accurate statewide recount before the electoral College deadline, and that the margin of error of the original count exceeded Bush's margin of victory) were never disputed.
Trump's State court challenges to the 2020 election are criminal if and only if they were based on knowingly false factual claims. Both the Federal and Georgia indictments promise to bring evidence that they were.
The electoral counts of 2001, 2017, and 2021 (and probably a few others I've missed) all included members of congress making motions to dismiss the electoral votes of entire states to change the outcome of the election. To their credit, none of the standing VPs entertained these motions, but "tried to officially overthrow the counted votes" is a bar we passed quite a while ago without much fanfare: none of the representatives making these motions saw consequences from doing so.
Making frivolous objections to electoral votes based on false claims of electoral irregularities (which wouldn't include 2001, but would probably include 2005 and definitely include 2017 and 2021) is bad and the congresscritters who did it should feel bad. But they are protected from prosecution by the Speech and Debate clause, so this isn't a case of selective prosecution. The House should probably have censured the Reps who made frivolous objections in 2017 - although most of them never got the chance to make false allegations on the record, so it would presumably only have been for disorderly conduct.
Incidentally, the VP doesn't have any discretion whether to entertain an objection - under the rules at the time, he has to accept it and allow a debate if it is supported by at least one Rep and at least one Senator (as in 2005 and 2021), and can't accept it if it is only supported by Reps (as in 2001 and 2017). (It now requires a fifth of the members of each house to force a debate on an objection).
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Tell me more about crossfire hurricane. What did they do to keep Obama in the White House and prevent Trump becoming president?
Hey you can “own” your property but we the government get its fruits and we decide what you do with the property. But that isn’t communism since you know you own the property.
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The claim was that he backed Hillary's bid, no? If we narrow it to Obama going for a third term then clearly not.
I'm not aware of any particular action on the part of Trump in Georgia so opening an investigation into a political rival on less than solid basis is at least equivalent.
Ok, what did Obama do after the election to try to make Clinton succeed him instead of Trump?
I don't know about that, but I do know it's very funny to watch the clip of Obama on SNL doing literal mic drop about 'Trump will never be president' and then the media shots of him in the White House meeting Trump (instead of Hillary) to do the handover of power.
It makes me laugh, at least.
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There are other ways to challenge an election that don't involve threatening violence, like what Gore did vs Bush. That's fine.
As far as I'm aware Trump is not being prosecuted for threats of violence because he never threatened violence. The federal indictment seems to be around what is being referred to as the 'fake electors' plot and trying to get Pence to reject certification. But if you look at historical challenges to election results the parties who have challenged the results have used similar 'fake electors'.
Interesting, I thought the case against him was based on the whole "inciting his supporters to go shit up the capitol" thing.
the situation is weird because the allegations are part of the text of the indictment but Trump is not actually being charged for incitement or anything else in regards to the Jan 6th riot. his lawyers tried to get that part of the indictment removed because they believed it was irrelevant and potentially prejudicial to a jury but the judge did not agree and let the text stand as-is. here is the text of his motion: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24078250-motion-to-strike-inflammatory-allegations
And here is the judges opinion for reference: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.258148/gov.uscourts.dcd.258148.158.0_1.pdf
An uncharitable reading as to why this text was included in the indictment could be so that third parties reporting on the indictment could muddle things for their audience and give the impression that Trump was being charged for the Jan 6th riots. I believe a similar thing may have happened with the statement by former intelligence officials about the Hunter Biden laptop. If you read the statement on the hunter biden laptop it doesn't actually say anything useful but other people could then portray the statement as saying something meaningful. The way the media works is kind of similar to chinese whispers but if you are aware of this then its possible to manipulate it for your benefit.
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