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When did Trump incite a riot? I listened to his speech that day. At no point did he call for violence. Anything he said is 100% protected free speech. If Trumps guilty then Biden, Kamala, every member of congress, and every Senator is guilty.
To me the only real case is the one in Georgia where he may have crossed some lines. He is also probably guilty of some things with classified documents but since Biden, Pence, Hillary have similar issues that feels a lot like lawfare and should be thrown out because the law hasn’t been equally applied.
The Georgia thing feels pretty much identical to the "very fine people" comment, where he supposedly called neonazis "very fine people", but in context actually said the opposite.
In the call where he was supposedly pressuring Brad Raffensberger to "find votes", he is very clearly saying that his team thinks there is fraud, and is asking for permission (or help) in investigating that fraud. The "finding" votes he's talking about is not a euphemism; he is literally saying that if fraud is investigated, that there will be at least enough to flip the state.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/03/politics/trump-brad-raffensperger-phone-call-transcript/index.html
This seems so blatantly inbounds ethically that it amazes me that this is what they're going after him for. Even the wikipedia page (not exactly unbiased) seems to clearly state that the was trying to get fraud investigated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Raffensperger_phone_call
Sure he may have been pressuring Brad Raffensberger to do something, but the something he was pressuring him to do doesn't seem illegal, or even questionably ethical.
As with the lawsuits, the Trump-Raffensberger phone call is improper (both as a matter of ethics and as a matter of criminal law) if and only if the factual claims Trump made were knowingly false. The Georgia indictment indicts the call as "False Statements and Writings" and "Solicitation of Felony Violation of Oath of Office" (in that Raffensberger knew there was no fraud, and would therefore have violated his oath of office by launching the investigation Trump requested). The Federal indictment doesn't charge individual bad acts, but it describes the phonecall as "the defendant lied to the Georgia Secretary of State".
Filing a false police report is not protected speech.
As a separate matter, Trump threatened Raffensberger with criminal liability for aiding and abetting the (non-existent) fraud. That probably should be a crime, but it doesn't appear to be given that it isn't charged in either the Federal or the Georgia indictment.
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I feel like sometimes I’m good at this where you say something in a scissor statement way. I usually do it in a playful way. Trumps good at this. His comments here can come off how you say but also outrage the left. He did it with the Proud Boys in the debates with his stand back and stand by. He did it with Russia and hacking. It’s a fun way to communicate where your meaning has a very mild and what you mean meaning but people can see a way to get offended by it.
I highly recommend listening to that call and/or reading the transcript -- there's very little room for the alternate interpretation, he goes on for like an hour about all the ways he thinks fraud was committed, and how many votes can be 'found' just by looking into one or two of these things. It doesn't really support the idea that he didn't believe what he was saying to be true either, he's very vehement.
I think it's more that he says a lot of stuff, and there's an army of people employed at sifting through it to snip out bits that make him look maximally evil out of context.
And that he is imprecise and careless about what he says, especially when he's regurgitating things he has only vaguely committed to memory, so he leaves a lot of room for others to figure out what he meant.
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On the latter part I think he does both. “The fine people” thing seemed to me that he was actually trying to be nuanced. The proud boy thing seemed more like a scissor statement and as is it was weird he was asked to condemn an org as white supremacists who had a black man as their president. The Russian stuff maybe a scissor statement.
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