To weigh in on this in a way that’s likely to annoy both of you, I will point out that, while yes, partisans are looking for any excuse to nail Trump because he’s a bad person, that doesn’t necessarily equate to “He MUST have done SOMETHING we can nail him for.”
That said, what we DO know of Trump’s dealings thus far means he’s made his opponents’ quest easy. To take one exchange a friend of mine had with a high school teacher years ago, explaining the First Amendment…as well as the fact that while there are no legal consequences for saying things (with a handful of exceptions), one is not immune from OTHER consequences as a result of what one says or does if it pisses off the wrong person.
Student: “So let me get this straight. I can walk up to a cop on a street corner and say to him ‘Yo, pig, you wanna go to Dunkin Donuts with me?”
Teacher: “Yep. But you better be squeaky clean when you do.”
That is, even if the cop can’t bust you for insulting him, if you, say, have an outstanding warrant for failure to appear in court, you’d better believe that the cop can (and probably will) arrest your ass and haul you in. And with Trump, there is a LOT of material to work with.
Now, that said, I will remind everyone here of the Ted Stevens corruption trial back in 2008. Namely that federal prosecutors *willfully withheld* exculpatory evidence AND evidence of a complaint filed by an FBI agent assigned to the case that prosecutors were doing this. Note that full disclosure is REQUIRED in criminal cases, especially when it exonerates the defendant, and prosecutors have a duty as officers of the court to do so. They did not, and so Stevens lost his re-election bid when the verdict came down (eight days before the election). The prosecutors were censured for it, sure, but the damage was already done.
So…even though the organization was convicted, I admit I’m more interested to see whether the conviction holds up on appeal. Especially since this was over tax fraud (which is usually the IRS’ bailiwick but they haven’t touched it) as opposed to the whole loans thing (which requires there to be a victim…and the banks really aren’t that, given Trump’s well-known and well-documented history on that score). Hell, the real estate unit at Deutsche Bank refused to deal with him after shenanigans in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis but other units, even knowing about it, still were fine with doing business. At that point, legally, they are assuming the risk.
Whether this gets overturned on appeal or not, j don’t know, but between the refusal to comply with providing documents (can go into that more later if anyone wants), the securities violation brewing over Truth Social (yeah something else is brewing that amounts to a criminal act, although it’s kind of a long-winded thing), apparently ordering IRS auditors to be sicced on James Comey and Andrew McCabe (which is expressly illegal for any executive official and explicitly includes the president) as well as the other stuff? Trump basically has spent the past several years fuckaround and now he’s finding out.
Not just friends but employees. Trump is a guy known for screwing workers out of wages owed simply because he’s a greedy asshole and didn’t want to pay them anymore (yes, that was a line in court testimony). If I remember correctly this was over refusing to pay back wages to casino employees and then even when ordered to, still refuses.
As far as legal culpability goes…yes, it would be hard to make a case that he incited the riot. From a MORAL perspective? His stirring the pot with the rally was ABSOLUTELY a proximate cause. Not to mention his pronouncements that “Pence didn’t have the guts” to overturn the election (never mind that multiple legal advisors tried telling Trump that no, Pence *can’t* change an outcome etc)
As it is, the charges they’re weighing are on attempting to interfere with the electoral count process and the debate over that is much murkier.
Still, ANY president doing what Trump did should automatically be barred from future consideration. If Barack Obama had tried this in 2016, I suspect you would not be as sanguine about this as you are with Trump.
