What Turley just did is gaslight America, telling those of us seeking to uphold rule of law that we're just acting hysterically. His conclusion: if you are a well-trained attorney, investigator, researcher and/or journalist who believes Trump committed a crime, you're just "mad."
1/ Turley is *right* that many of us, me included, are angered by injustice, violations of the rule of law, lies being told about us and/or our nation in the media or by politicians. What he assumes, without evidence, is that the angry can't act justly or soberly or with caution.
2/ Today I heard 20 minutes of audio that was all about me. The audio included so many lies about me, my history, my actions, my views, my philosophy, and my values that I would have to blow *days* responding. I won't. There's no time to waste on lies. So I'm angry, but resolved.
3/ On *infinitely* more important matters than anything having to do with me, Americans are angry about the whirlwind of lies and risible behavior this president has brought into our information ecosystem. That doesn't mean we can't or don't act soberly and with resolve about it.
4/ Pre-Turley, I'd never heard an attorney use the defense "y'all just mad" to thousands of pages of sworn federal testimony establishing both federal felonies and impeachable conduct, nor to a Congressional report detailing and carefully citing the key elements of the testimony.
5/ As a defense lawyer I learned it benefits poor behavior to consider only a portion of a record, and benefits truth to look at its entirety. I urge anyone looking at a tweet/essay excerpt of mine to read the whole thread/essay. Congress must do the same with the Ukraine record.
6/ What's amazing in this impeachment is that even a poor defense to criminal charges usually can take a portion of a record and highlight how it raises questions. Trump's defense *forgoes* that usual route and instead simply lies about the facts, law and convention. Turley, too.
7/ I've received death threats, threats against my job and more for years. From other quarters, I've been libeled through lies about my actions and deliberately misleading selective quotation of past essays/tweets *attached* to the longer record that'd prove the quotations false.
8/ The country writ large has been abused, gaslit and libeled in a very similar way, so I feel keenly what I think is the same sort of anger all of us do toward Trump/others at the local and national levels. We must never let righteous indignation be confused for lack of purpose.
9/ Attorneys are keyed into looking at the entirety of a record, reading closely for the meaning of words, taking an exceedingly dim view of anything taken out of context or presumptions made about people without evidence. You see it in the three justifiably angry lawyers today.
10/ We're in the gaze of history now: members of Congress, members of media, all of us on social media, indeed all Americans. We'll all face accusations of acting emotionally or for ourselves, and must hold fast to what we know to be true and honorable, whatever critics say. /end
